LEARNED HELPLESSNESS IN CHICKENS (GALLUS-GALLUS) - EVIDENCE FOR ATTENTIONAL BIAS

The behavioral effects of exposure to uncontrollable events include mo tivational, associative, physiological, and attentional components. Th e learned helplessness hypothesis states that exposure to uncontrollab le events results in an organism learning that its behavior and the ou tcomes of its behavior are independent. Research has indicated that th e manner in which subjects exposed to uncontrollable events process in formation, and subsequently how they respond, is skewed, with a dispos ition to focus attention on external, rather than internal, relevant a nd irrelevant cues. The experiment was designed to determine if the al teration in attentional processing generalized across species and on a n unlearned behavior, tonic immobility (TI). Subjects were pretreated in one of the components of a learned helplessness triadic design and tested under varying external conditions that have been shown to modif y the TI response. Exposure to uncontrollable events directly modified the duration of TI. Additionally, exposure to uncontrollable events d irectly influenced the effect of external stimuli on measures of TI. T he results indicate that the attentional bias caused by exposure to un controllable events can be generalized to other non-rodent species, an d that this attentional bias influences both learned and unlearned beh aviors. (C) 1997 Academic Press.