Testing Antipsychotic Drug Effects with Operant Behavioral Techniques

Operant techniques offer one of the best possible controls of behavior. Depending on the pattern of reinforcement the animals produce characteristic patterns of responding (Ferster and Skinner, 1957). As these patterns have been found highly reproducible in different species (even in man), schedule controlled behavior is a phenomenon of great generality; and it is on these patterns that the critical behavioral effects of drugs depend upon (Kelleher and Morse, 1968, 1969). That is why especially operant procedures can uniquely provide very stable and reproducible baselines for drug studies, and it also explains the broad use of these techniques in drug testing, even if they require a lot of time and effort (Cook and Sepinwall, 1976a; Dews, 1978). The specifity of behavioral changes and the sensitivity to drugs is a further advantage of operant procedures (Cook and Kelleher, 1963), as is the possibility of testing drug effects on the behavior of an intact living system (Cook and Sepinwall, 1976b).