Extinction of an instrumental task in the amphibian Rhinella arenarum under different acquisition conditions: Amount of practice vs. Magnitude of reinforcement

MUZIO, R. N., PUDDINGTON, M. M. & PAPINI, M. R.

Donostia, San Sebastián

Congreso; XXV International Meeting of the Spanish Society for Comparative Psychology (SEPC); 2013

Spanish Society for Comparative Psychology (SEPC)

Its has been observed that toads that have learned a runway task using water as reward, showed different extinction response as a result of several acquisition parameters. Overtrained animals showed stronger resistance to extinction than animals with less acquisition practice. In a separated study, animals trained under a small magnitude of reward program, extinguished their response faster than those trained with a large magnitude of reward. Both results are not enough to answer the question about which are the determinants of extinction in instrumental learning in toads, since animals who received a higher amount of trials, also received a higher magnitude of total reward. In present study, 4 groups of toads were trained in a runway, receiving as reward a total of 1500 or 4500 seconds of access to deionized water, distributed in 5 or 15 trials -one per day. Only the group receiving the large magnitude of reward distributed in the higher number of trials showed significantly more resistance to extinction than the other three groups. These results suggest that none of the two factors, practice or magnitude of reward, by itself predict the extinction behavior, but the extinction is the result of the interaction of both variables.