Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Misanin, James R.
• Wilson, Heather A.
• Schwarz, Peter R.
• Tuschak, Joshua B.
• Hinderliter, Charles F.

Titel

Low Body Temperature Affects Associative Processes in Long-Trace Conditioned Flavor Aversion

Ist Teil von

• Physiology & behavior, 1998-12, Vol.65 (3), p.581-590

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

1998

Quelle

Elsevier Journal Backfiles on ScienceDirect (DFG Nationallizenzen)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A series of experiments examined the effect of low body temperature on the associative process in long-trace conditioned flavor aversion. Experiment 1 demonstrated that maintaining a low body temperature between conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) administration facilitates the associative process and allows a flavor aversion to be conditioned in young rats over an interval that would normally not support conditioning. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that this was due neither to lingering systemic saccharin serving as a CS nor to a cold induced enhancement of US intensity. Experiment 4 demonstrated that inducing hypothermia at various times during a 3-h CS-US interval results in an apparent delay of reinforcement gradient. We propose that a cold induced decrease in metabolic rate slows the internal clock that governs the perception of time and that the CS-US association depends upon perceived contiguity rather than upon an external clock-referenced contiguity.