Hippocampal lesions and pavlovian cardiovascular conditioning

New Zealand albino rabbits received either sham, cortical control, or hippocampal lesions and were subjected to differential Pavlovian conditioning in which tones of different frequencies served as conditional stimuli (CSs), and a brief paraorbital electric shock train served as the unconditional stimulus. Heart rate (HR), blood pressure (BP), and electromyographic (EMG) conditional responses (CRs) were recorded. Animals with cortical and hippocampal damage or animals with cortical damage alone revealed attenuated bradycardiac CRs, but HR CRs of the former two groups did not significantly differ. BP changes were minimal; reliable differences were not obtained between CS+ and CS?. However, these changes consisted of small but reliable depressor responses, which were not affected by either cortical or hippocampal lesions. Few EMG CRs were obtained. These data, combined with those of previous experiments, suggest that forebrain structures may modulate higher level processing of stimulus information, perhaps in terms of assessing the biological significance of such stimulation.     

A comparison of adult women's and men's ascriptions of negative traits to the same and opposite sex

College students (N=135), ranging from 19 to 55 years of age, were studied to determine their sex stereotypes. Results from the present study indicated that adult males were significantly more negative than adult females in their evaluations of both sexes. One possible explanation that may be offered to account for these findings is that current emphasis of female rights may be causing negativistic reactions on the part of males toward both sex groups.     

Behavioral engineering: the use of response priming to improve prescribed self-medication

A major problem in outpatient treatment has been the extreme irregularity with which patients use medication prescribed for them. As a new approach to resolving this problem, a portable operant apparatus was developed based on response priming and escape reinforcement. The apparatus sounded a tone at the time that a pill was to be taken. When the user turned a knob to terminate the tone, the apparatus delivered the pill into the user's hand. The apparatus was evaluated with six normal adults using a medically inert pill. A greater proportion of the pills were taken by each subject when using the special apparatus as compared with the use of a portable alarm timer or the usual wristwatch. These results demonstrate a new approach for increasing the regularity of self-administration of medicines.     

Frequency of attack in shock-elicited aggression as a function of the performance of individual rats

Fighting rates between paired rats were investigated as a function of the probability of attack by a single animal. Animals from stable high-fighting and low-fighting frequency pairs were intermatched to detect individual high-fighting and low-fighting rats. Pairs of high-fighting animals then received saline or different chlorpromazine dosages during successive sessions. Finally, single high-fighting members of each pair also received the different drug dosages. The chief findings were that: (a) rats showing high fighting rates when matched against each other revealed low fighting rates when matched against one, but not the other member of a low-fighting pair; and (b) high-fighting rats decreased their fighting rates as their own or their opponent's chlorpromazine dosage increased. These results indicated that a low rate of fighting on the part of one rat results in a low fighting rate on the part of its opponent.     

Microcomputer analyses of performance on a portable,simple visual RT task during sustained operations

The Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania There is a need for brief, portable performance measures that are free of practice effects but that reliably show the impact of sleep loss on performance during sustained work. Reaction time (RT) tasks hold considerable promise in meeting this need, if the extensive number of responses they typically yield can be processed in ways that quickly provide the essential analyses. While testing the utility of a portable visual RT task during a sustained, quasi-continuous work schedule of 54 h, we developed a microcomputer software system that inputs, edits, transforms, analyzes, and reduces the data from the RT portable audiotapes, for each 10-min trial on the task. With relatively minor modifications, the software system can be used on a minimally configured microcomputer system that supports BASIC. The software is flexible and capable of retrieving distorted data, and it generates a variety of dependent variables reflecting intratrial optimum response capacity, lapsing, and response slowing.