Abstract
The capacities of three different conditioned stimulus modalities (light, noise, and airflow produced by a fan) to produce fear-potentiated startle were evaluated. Previous experiments have shown that following either light-shock or noise-shock pairings, both the light and noise conditioned stimuli acquire the ability to potentiate the acoustically elicited startle response in rats (the so-calledfear-potentiated startle effect). In Experiment 1, the ability of airflow produced by a fan to act as a conditioned stimulus was investigated. Rats were given either paired or impaired fan-shock training followed by a test for fear-potentiated startle. The fan conditioned stimulus potentiated startle only in the group given explicit fan-shock pairings. In Experiment 2, we evaluated the discriminability of the three conditioned stimulus modalities. Rats were given light, noise, or fan-shock pairings and were subsequently tested for fear-potentiated startle with the trained conditioned stimulus as well as the two remaining novel conditioned stimuli. Only the trained conditioned stimulus potentiated startle. These results show that fear-potentiated startle can be produced with three discriminable conditioned stimulus modalities, allowing the future use of fear-potentiated startle in the investigation of higher order conditioning phenomena.
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Preparation of this article was supported by NIMH G-rantMH-25642, MIM7840, Research Scientist Development Award MH-00004, a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the State of Connecticut.
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Falls, W.A., Davis, M. Fear-potentiated startle using three conditioned stimulus modalities. Animal Learning & Behavior 22, 379–383 (1994). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209157
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03209157