Rats maintain optimal choice when facing long terminal links in a "suboptimal choice" procedure.

Abstract

It has been recently reported that rats' optimal behavior in the "suboptimal choice" procedure is eliminated when the duration of the terminal links is increased to 30 s or more (Cunningham & Shahan, 2019). The main goal of the present study is to analyze the generality of such results, via a procedure that has been extensively used in the study of rats' performance in this task. In Experiment 1, nine rats were exposed to a procedure that presented levers as discriminative stimuli, varying the duration of their presentation from 10 s to 50 s across conditions. The results showed that rats preferred the optimal alternative in all conditions. To further analyze the relationship between rats' preferences and the duration of the terminal links, in Experiment 2 we contrasted the performance of two groups that differed in the configuration of the stimuli associated to the terminal links. For one of them, the stimuli were the same as in the Cunningham and Shahan's (2019) experiment (Tone + Light); for the other, the stimulus was light only. The results show that rats were suboptimal in the former group, and optimal in the latter. We discuss our results in terms of the prevalence of rats' optimal behavior when confronted with the manipulation of different variables and the necessity of improving the knowledge about the relationship between optimal/suboptimal choice and the salience of the discriminative stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).