JUVENILE RETENTION DEFICITS FOR A CONDITIONED EMOTIONAL RESPONSE IN RATS: IMPLICATIONS FOR INFANTILE AMNESIA.
Item
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Title
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JUVENILE RETENTION DEFICITS FOR A CONDITIONED EMOTIONAL RESPONSE IN RATS: IMPLICATIONS FOR INFANTILE AMNESIA.
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Identifier
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AAI8501115
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identifier
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8501115
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Creator
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BERK, ALVIN M.
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Contributor
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Arthur Reber
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Date
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1984
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Psychobiology
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Abstract
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Nineteen-day-old and adult rats were given off-baseline tone-footshock pairings so that tone presentation during licking 48 hr later produced equal suppression in both ages. Controls showed the suppression to be due to associative factors. Despite suppression equal to adults' at 48-hr testing, pups displayed significantly poorer retention (infantile amnesia) when compared with adults 8, 16, 32, or 64 days after conditioning. Suppression on 48-hr tests could be reduced in pups but not adults if nonreinforced off-baseline presentations of the tone were interposed in the retention interval. This off-baseline extinction procedure also reduced suppression by pups when the nonreinforced tone presentations differed in acoustic frequency from the conditional stimulus. With the same frequencies, excitatory generalization tests disclosed significant and similar generalization gradients for both ages, suggesting that the greater memorial interference observed in pups stemmed more from their heightened susceptibility to off-baseline extinction than from differences between ages in generalization. Collectively, these studies suggest that extinctionlike processes could contribute to ontogenetic retention deficits usually classified as "infantile amnesia.".
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
