The long term, proactive effect of preshock and ECS as determinants of subsequent responses to punishment

Abstract

Following alleyway food training, Group 1 was given 3 min of preshock plus ECS (25 mA) 10 sec later on each of 5 days. Group 2 was given preshock and no ECS. Group 3 was given ECS only, and Group 4 was untreated. Group 2 evinced slower alleyway running times than Group 1 and both were more suppressed than Groups 3 and 4 on early food retraining trials prior to test shock. Following retraining, test shock in the alley resulted in the slowest running times for Group 2, and an intermediately slow performance for Group 1 relative to the ECS-only and control groups on early shock recovery trials. For Experiment 2 ECS durations of 0.4 and 0.8 sec were combined factorially with ECS administration on each of 5 or 10 days (4 groups of 9 rats each). No-ECS and hip-shock control groups were included. Test shock given 7 days after treatment resulted in marked suppression of a stable free operant response in both 0.4 sec groups relative to the remaining four. Experiment 3 involved a replication of Experiment 1 with the single exception that the ECS duration was increased from 0.4 to 0.8 sec. The results of Experiment 3 basically paralleled those of Experiment 1.