Intertrial unconditioned stimuli differentially impact trace conditioning

Douglas A. Williams, Travis P. Todd, Chrissy M. Chubala, Elliot A. Ludvig

Three experiments assessed how appetitive conditioning in rats changes over the duration of a trace conditioned stimulus (CS) when unsignaled unconditioned stimuli (USs) are introduced into the intertrial interval. In Experiment 1, a target US occurred at a fixed time either shortly before (embedded), shortly after (trace), or at the same time (delay) as the offset of a 120-s CS. During the CS, responding was most suppressed by intertrial USs in the trace group, less so in the delay group, and least in the embedded group. Unreinforced probe trials revealed a bell-shaped curve centered on the normal US arrival time during the trace interval, suggesting that temporally specific learning occurred both with and without intertrial USs. Experiments 2a and 2b confirmed that the bulk of the trace CS became inhibitory when intertrial USs were scheduled, as measured by summation and retardation tests, even though CS offset evoked a temporally precise conditioned response. Thus, an inhibitory CS may give rise to new stimuli specifically linked to its termination, which are excitatory. A modification to the microstimulus temporal difference model is offered to account for the data.