Temporal cuing of runs in series of reward events reduces interevent anticipation

1986 
In Experiment 1, a group of rats were runway trained on each of two reward series for 32 days. The two series consisted of three runs, the first two of which were, respectively, rewarded and nonrewarded; the third run was rewarded in one series but nonrewarded in the other. A 40-min interval separated the two series; the first and second runs within the series were separated by a 10-min interval, whereas the second and third runs were separated by a 30-sec interval. The reward (and nonreward) events and temporal cues of the two series are designated R-NR/R-NN. A second group was similarly trained, with the exception that the 10-min interval separated the second and third runs (RN-R/RN-N). Both groups developed appropriate differential running on the third run of the two series, and the RN-R/RN-N animals ran appropriately (slowly) on the second run of both series. Appropriate Run 2 performance appeared in one half of the R-NR/R-NN animals (depending upon order of series presentation); the remaining half ran faster on Run 2 of the R-NR series than on the same run of the R-NN series, an effect currently termed interevent anticipation. A cue shift phase in which all within-series intervals were 30 sec showed that the temporal intervals were controlling performance before the shift. Experiment 2 showed that interevent anticipation appears when all within-series intervals are either 10 min or 30 sec from the beginning of training, suggesting that the elimination of interevent anticipation in Experiment 1 was due to the differential cuing of runs by the temporal intervals rather than the particular interval duration. The overall findings suggest that the similarity of Run 2 and Run 3 performance termed interevent anticipation may be due to a failure to discriminate the ordinal position of runs within a series.
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