Retention and delayed extinction of an instrumental learning in Rihnella arenarum

PUDDINGTON, MARTÍN M. & MUZIO, RUBÉN N.

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Otro; Paper en preparacion; 2011

According to previous studies, extinction in toads is a monotonic function of magnitude of reward and amount of acquisition practice. In this work we explore the relationship with the delay between acquisition and extinction. Three groups of toads were trained in a runway situation. After 15 days of acquisition each of them was assigned to a different delayed-extinction category: A non-delayed group started extinction the day after acquisition finished. A four-day-delayed group remained three days without any training and started extinction on the following day. Finally, there was an eight-days-delayed group. Results showed no significant differences between the first extinction day for the three groups. Furthermore, no statistical differences were found for the extinction rate among groups. These are the first results on the study of regulation of toads´ extinction learning processes on a simple task. Future experiments will focus on the effect of longer delayed extinction periods over retention, in order to determine how long can memories last and how labile they are in agreement with task-complexity.