Attenuation of Latent Inhibition after Compound Pre-Exposure: Associative and Perceptual Explanations

Abstract

Three experiments used rats as subjects and the conditioned emotional response (CER) paradigm to examine the effect of pre-exposure to a compound stimulus on the extent of latent inhibition to an element of that compound. In Experiment 1a a group of rats exposed to a compound that comprised a tone and a click exhibited less latent inhibition to the tone than did a group that had received pre-exposure to the tone in isolation. Experiment 1b showed that pre-exposure to the tone/click compound also resulted in an attenuation of latent inhibition to the click relative to a group that was pre-exposed to the click in isolation. Experiment 2 demonstrated that latent inhibition to the tone was left intact following pre-exposure to the tone in compound with a light. This pattern of results seems to be most plausibly explained in terms of the presence and absence of generalization decrement following compound pre-exposure.