The stability and control of conditioned noise aversion in the tilt cage.
Quick within-session reversals steady avoidance behavior and sharpen measurement of stimulus intensity effects.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Halpern et al. (1966) worked with rats in a tilt cage. The cage tilted when the rat moved to the noisy side.
The team flipped the silent side several times each session. They wanted steadier avoidance and clearer intensity effects.
What they found
Multiple quick reversals kept the rats’ avoidance steady. The animals also reacted faster to small changes in noise loudness.
Single reversals had given jumpy data. Many reversals gave smooth, sensitive measures.
How this fits with other research
Dallemagne et al. (1970) later used a titration cage. Their rats held shock at low levels for hours with almost zero drift. This refined the stability goal M et al. started.
Mosk et al. (1984) ran signaled avoidance and found a minimum shock threshold. Past that point, more shock did not help and sometimes hurt. Their plateau result pairs with M et al.’s cleaner intensity curves.
Weisman et al. (1975) pitted schedule control against intensity control. As tones got harder to tell apart, schedule control rose and intensity control fell. Their trade-off warns us: frequent reversals help only while the stimulus stays easy to notice.
Why it matters
You can borrow the rapid-reversal trick any time you need clean, sensitive data from avoidance or escape tasks. Flip the safe corner two or three times per session while you sweep stimulus values. The steady baseline will let you spot smaller intervention effects and make quicker decisions.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Twenty-six rats were used to study the development of stable conditioned responding to terminate white noise (100 or 105 db) in a tilt cage apparatus. Preliminary work, with one end of the cage consistently associated with silence, demonstrated stability at a high level of cumulative noise-off time per session. Time spent at the noise-off cage end was unaffected by lay-off and showed adaptation to reversal of the cage end functions. Variability in reversal acquisition, insensitivity to stimulus intensity changes and persistence in remaining at one end of the cage in the absence of noise-termination contingencies indicated the need for more precise behavioral control. A schedule programming several reversals of the no-noise end at variable intervals within each session was developed. Performance on the latter schedule was characterized by stability of high noise-off times and also proved more sensitive than the preliminary method to stimulus intensity changes (55, 70, 100 db) as measured by both cumulated noise-off time and cage crossing rates. The ease of training combined with sensitivity to stimulus change and the lack of highly specific motor response requirements make this technique promising for use with animals potentially debilitated by drugs or surgical after-effects.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1966 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1966.9-357