Rats were required to discriminate between central nervous system (CNS) stimulant drugs (cocaine and amphetamine) and saline. Experiments with cocaine involved two types of T-mazes. In one maze the incentive was escape from shock, in the other procedure the incentive was food. Cocaine discrimination occurred slowly or not at all in the shock-escape maze but fairly rapidly in the maze motivated by food and avoidance of shock. D-amphetamine was slowly discriminated in the T-maze, shock-escape procedure. These data raise the question of whether a single training procedure can be used to compare the discriminability of different classes of drugs.
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