Sign Tracking Phenomenon In Long-Evans Rats

Sign tracking is the tendency to approach a stimulus that is predictive of food. There have been several studies that have examined this phenomenon in rats as rearing toward a light stimulus predictive of food. The purpose of this study was to provide further research of this phenomenon in Long-Evans rats. Holland (1977) performed one of the earlier studies on Pavlovian conditioned responses. The purpose of his study was to examine how the characteristics of a conditioned stimulus (CS) influence the conditioned responses (CR) that they provoke. Importantly, in his first experiment, Holland (1977) aimed to explore whether or not the CS of a light and/or tone would elicit a different response when associated with food. In addition, the experiment’s goal was to account for these differences possibly because …show more content…
Their study was separated into five experiments in order to examine the relationship between the predictive accuracy of a stimulus and the amount of processing that was associated with it (Kaye & Pearce, 1984). In the first experiment, the researchers wished to examine the effects of appetitive conditioning on the observational response (OR) to a light. The conditioning was done over six sessions where the rats were presented with food after a pre-exposure of 10 seconds to the light. Similar to the experiment done by Holland (1977), Kaye and Pearce (1984) observed the rat’s behaviours during the conditioning. In contrast, their study defined rearing as the rats making contact with the light with either their snout or paws (Kaye & Pearce, 1984). Their results for this experiment differed greatly from those obtained from Holland (1977), in that Kaye and Pearce (1984) found that rearing decreased from approximately 45 rears in the first conditioning session to approximately 20 in the final