Effects of Pretraining with Fear and Escape Conditioning on Shuttlebox Avoidance Acquisition by Goldfish

Abstract

Goldfish received 20 trials of fear conditioning with or without an escape contingency, escape conditioning, shock alone, or adaptation prior to shuttlebox avoidance acquisition. Fear conditioning facilitated acquisition as predicted by two-process theory. The result is interpreted to show that fear conditioning establishes the CS as motivational and that the present procedure enhances the effect of an aversive CS. Neither shock alone nor escape conditioning significantly affected acquisition.