The effect of direct goal-box placement on serial pattern learning in rats

Abstract

The present experiment examined whether rats could learn serial pattern of reinforcement when they were trained with direct goal-box placement procedure (DP).In the original learning phase, rats were placed directly in the baited goal-box. One group of subjects (Group M) received decreasing monotonic patterns in which the magnitude of each successive pattern item (food quantity) was decreasing ; that is, in a “less then” rule. The other group (Group R) received random patterns in which the items were arranged in random order.In the transfer phase, rats were placed in the start-box and were required to run through the alley into the goal-box. Half of the rats in Group M (the M-M) learned a monotonic pattern, 14-7-3-1-0, while the other half (the M-NM) learned a nonmonotonic pattern, 14-1-3-7-0. Similarly, half of the rats in Group R (the R-M) learned the monotonic pattern ; the other half (the R-NM) the nonmonotonic pattern.The results indicated that M-M learned the monotonic pattern faster than R-M, showing positive transfer, and for M-NM and R-NM, learning of nonmonotonic pattern was not observed before the last day of the transfer phase.These findings suggest that rats can learn serial pattern even if they were not allowed to make instrumental running responses in the alley. Hence the rule-encoding theory on serial pattern learning seems to be applicable to the situation with specific training procedure (DP) employed here.