Integration of cardiac responses to serial stimuli after Pavlovian conditioning in rats.

Abstract

The expression of cardiac responses to sequences of two sounds was studied in restrained rats following discriminative trace or delay conditioning. Stimuli paired with a tail shock 10 sec later (CS1) elicited conditioned bradycardia. Unpaired or neutral stimuli (CS0) elicited mostly tachycardia. Rats did not learn to suppress responding to nonreinforced sequences with an interval of 6 sec between sounds. Responses to the second stimulus were significantly augmented following a CS1 stimulus, but not following a CS0 stimulus. Real-time summation of simple responses provided a more complete and quantitative prediction of dual responses than did resetting or facilitation. These results extend the time range over which summation may be observed from less than 2 sec to at least 16 sec. They appear to be inconsistent with models involving competition between unitary representations of stimuli in short-term memory and suggest the existence of multiple stimulus traces with independent time courses.