Simultaneous Visual Discrimination in Rats: Training Strategies

Abstract

Stimulus pretraining methods were found to be ineffective in facilitating the learning of simultaneous figure discrimination in rats. A difficult brightness discrimination was learned but stimulus pretraining had no effect on learning. The absence of a visual stimulus, although correlated with reward, was not sufficient to produce approach responses to a darkened key, in one pretraining condition. The failure to learn the figure discrimination may be attributed to emotional factors and to a lack of correlated cues rather than to inattention or to an inadequacy in the rat's visual apparatus.