Factors affecting context specificity of appetitive conditioned responding

The present experiment contributes to the identification of factors affecti ng magnitude of context specificity of simple appetitive conditioned respon ding. Rats were first trained to associate an auditory and a visual stimulu s with food. Each of these stimuli was consistently presented in a distinct ive environmental context. Groups of rats differed only in the number of co nditioning trials. At test, all groups received trials on which each of the stimuli was presented either in the same context as used during training, or in the different context. Rats made significantly fewer food-magazine vi sits on different-context trials than on same-context trials only under the conditions that the stimulus tested was the auditory stimulus, which gener ally elicited a stronger conditioned response (CR) than did the visual stim ulus, and the animals had received a relatively small number of conditionin g trials. Apparently, magnitude of context specificity is affected by facto rs determining the strength of the appetitive conditioned response to the t arget stimulus. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.