Food Deprivation as Learning Context

Food Deprivation as Context

Background

Many applications of behavior science involve bringing responses under the appropriate stimulus control. Responding in the presence of one stimuli, but not another is known as discriminated responding. One example of this is driving in the presence of a green light, while stopping in the presence of a red light. While teaching discriminated responding to learners, various other stimuli are present within the environment. These other stimuli (such as time of day or even emotions) may create a learning context by effect how discriminated responding is learned. Because these other stimuli create the learning context in, they may also effect the likelihood that the response will occur in different learning contexts.

Research Goal

The aim of this study was to investigate interactions between levels of food deprivation as a learning context in the acquisition of discriminated responding and subsequent testing.

Method

Two groups of mice underwent discrimination training under different food deprivation levels. One group received discriminated response training under 24-h food deprivation and the other group received the same training under 0-h food deprivation. Both groups then underwent discrimination tests under both 24 hour and 0 hour deprivation conditions to assess the extent to which the learned response under one deprivation condition generalized to the other.

Group	Reinforcement sessions	Extinction sessions	Test 1	Test 2
Group 24-hr	24-hour deprivation	24-hour deprivation	0-hour deprivation	24-hour deprivation
Group 0-hr	0-hour deprivation	0-hour deprivation	24-hour deprivation	0-hour deprivation

Results

Results suggest that animals made more total responses during the test conditions under which their initial training occurred. This suggests that the deprivation level in which a response is learned, could affect generalization of the response under different deprivation levels. More generally speaking the context in which a response is initially learned can affect the likelihood that that same response will occur under different contexts.

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