Rats’ midsession reversal performance: the nature of the response

Aaron P. Smith, Kristina F. Pattison, Thomas R. Zentall

The midsession reversal task involves a simple simultaneous discrimination that predictably reverses midway through a session. Under various conditions, pigeons generally both anticipate the reversal and perseverate once it has occurred, whereas rats tend to make very few of either kind of error. In the present research, we investigated the hypothesis that the difference in performance between rats and pigeons is related to the nature of the responses made. We hypothesized that rats could have been better at bridging the intertrial interval by keeping the relevant paw close to the lever while eating, whereas the pigeons had to remove their beak from the response key and insert it into the feeder, thus making it difficult to mediate the response last made. In the present experiment, in successive phases, rats were trained to leverpress or nose-poke on a 40-trial midsession reversal, an 80-trial midsession reversal, and a variable-location reversal. The results showed that the leverpress group acquired the task faster than the nose-poke group, but that both groups reached comparable levels of performance. Thus, the difference in the natures of the responses cannot fully account for the differences in accuracy between rats and pigeons. Additionally, differences in the types of errors made by the two groups suggest that the nature of the response plays different roles in the performance of this task.