Lick-shock contingencies in the rat.
Punishment crushed licking, avoidance kept it high, and shock frequency trade-offs muddy clean comparisons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team placed rats in small cages with a metal drinking tube.
Every lick could trigger a mild shock to the tongue under four rules: no shock, free shock, punishment, or avoidance.
They counted licks and shocks to see how each rule changed drinking.
What they found
Rats licked most when they could avoid every shock.
Punishment cut licking to the lowest rate.
Free shock and no-shock fell in between.
Keeping shock counts equal across rules was impossible while keeping the lick-rate order the same.
How this fits with other research
Hulse (1960) built the first lick-triggered pump; Quinsey (1972) added the shock twist.
Jones et al. (2024) later showed that random-interval food schedules make cocaine-taking resist punishment; the rat keeps pressing despite shocks.
Migan‐Gandonou et al. (2020) and Goldman et al. (1979) flipped the idea to humans: a quick mouthwash after rumination slashed the behavior 97%.
Same mouth-to-aversive link, new species, bigger effect.
Why it matters
The study warns you: punishment can stop a response cold, but avoidance keeps it alive.
When you add a consequence, track both the behavior and how often the aversive event actually happens.
If you can’t hold the aversive rate constant across conditions, rate differences may be an artifact, not a treatment win.
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Join Free →Plot client behavior and the aversive count on the same graph; if the aversive rate drifts, re-balance conditions before you trust the behavior drop.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Hungry rats were allowed to lick an 8% sucrose solution and then one of four lick-shock contingency conditions was superimposed on the licking baseline. These conditions were: free-operant avoidance, free shock, punishment, and no shock. From highest to lowest response rates, the groups fell in the order-avoidance, no shock, free shock, and punishment. Lick rates adjusted rapidly to introduction and removal of the contingencies. Post-shock responding was lowest in the punishment condition and highest in the free shock condition. No method was found simultaneously to equate shock frequency and separate response rates for the three shock contingency conditions. Only small, or no, reductions in shock rate occurred over sessions under the free-operant avoidance schedule when the shock-shock interval was 10 sec but large reductions occurred when the shock-shock interval was reduced to either 1 or 2 sec.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1972 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1972.17-119