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Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior logoLink to Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior
. 1978 Jan;29(1):87–103. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1978.29-87

Warmup in avoidance as a function of time since prior training1

Philip N Hineline
PMCID: PMC1332811  PMID: 16812042

Abstract

On avoidance procedures, rats and pigeons typically show warmup effects, characterized by improving performance within sessions and loss of the improvement (“warmup decrement”) between sessions. Between-session losses were examined by varying the time between periods of avoidance training. In one experiment, rats lived fulltime in conditioning chambers while intermission intervals were varied. In a second experiment, the animals lived in home cages between sessions; timeout intervals were introduced at midession, producing recurrence of warmup in the second half-session. In both experiments, the warmup decrements increased substantially as the timeout or intersession intervals were increased from zero to 30 minutes. With intervals of 60 or 120 minutes, the decrements approached or exceeded those obtained with intervals of a day or more. When avoidance was interposed between appetitive sessions, the appetitive responding was disrupted, but this seemed unrelated to the warmup or to the proficiency of avoidance. The warmup in avoidance shares characteristics with transient punishment effects, with the Kamin effect, and with habituation phenomena, but it is premature to assume that they reflect common processes.

Keywords: warmup, avoidance, suppression, punishment, Kamin effect, lever press, chain pull, rats

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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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