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Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares
BIBTEX RIS

SHOCK INTENSITY AND SIGNALED AVOIDANCE RESPONDING

1984; Wiley; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1901/jeab.1984.42-67

ISSN

1938-3711

Autores

Deisy das Graças de Souza, Antônio Bento Alves de Moraes, João Cláudio Todorov,

Tópico(s)

Animal Behavior and Welfare Studies

Resumo

Five rats were submitted to a signaled free‐operant avoidance contingency. Throughout the experiment, shock intensity was varied from 0.1 to 8.0 mA, with shock duration constant at 200 milleseconds. Results indicate: (a) an all‐or‐none effect of shock intensity on response and shock rates, on percentage of shocks avoided, and on frequency of occurrence of responding during the preshock stimulus; and (b) no systematic effect of shock intensity on stimulus control, measured either by the percentage of stimulus presentations accompanied by a response or by the percentage of responses that occurred during those preshock stimuli. Such results indicate that for each subject there is a minimum shock intensity necessary to establish and maintain avoidance responding; intensities higher than this minimum value have little or no effect on responding (with an upper limit for those strong intensities with a general disruptive effect on behavior).

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