Discriminated Response Patterning in Goldfish with Successive Presentation and Explicitly Unpaired Pseudoconditioning Procedures

Dominic Zerbolio, University of Missouri-St. Louis
L Wickstra

Abstract

Goldfish show discriminated responding by shuttling in increasingly more US paired time frames than unpaired time frames both for the successive-presentation and explicitly unpaired pseudoconditioning procedures, where measurement, in addition to the CS, is made in a comparable period of the intertriai interval just prior to the US. These data strongly question stimulus-specific interpretations of response patterns arising from the use of the successive-presentation procedure, suggest that goldfish learn a conditioned inhibition to an unpaired stimulus, and may imply that the explicitly unpaired pseudoconditioning procedure is an appropriate control, in goldfish, for the successive-presentation procedure.