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. 1978 Jul;30(1):37–46. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1978.30-37

Automaintenance in guinea pigs: effects of feeding regimen and omission training1

Alan Poling, Teresa Poling
PMCID: PMC1332730  PMID: 16812086

Abstract

Behavior maintained by stimulus-reinforcer pairings was examined. Guinea pigs maintained at 85 per cent of free-feeding weights reliably contacted a retractable lever presented before delivery of a single piece of guinea-pig chow or a 45-milligram guinea-pig pellet. When animals were given free access to one food and received the second food preceded by the lever, contact responses persisted. Such responses seldom occurred when a single food was freely available and was also delivered after lever presentation. Introduction of an omission training (negative automaintenance) procedure, in which lever contacts resulted in lever retraction and prevented food delivery, strongly reduced lever contacts. Observation indicated that mouthing the food cup, instead of the lever, became the prominent behavior during the prefood stimulus under the omission training procedure.

Keywords: respondent conditioning, automaintenance, negative automaintenance, omission training, feeding regimen, lever contact, guinea pigs

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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