Discrimination of acoustic patterns in rats using the water T-maze

Martínez de la Mora, Daniela, 1983-; Toro Soto, Juan Manuel, 1976-

Discrimination of acoustic patterns in rats using the water T-maze

Citation

de la Mora DM, Toro JM. Discrimination of acoustic patterns in rats using the water T-maze. Psicológica. 2014;35(2): 195-208.

Abstract

The extraction of abstract rules and their generalization to new items has/nbeen proposed to be at the heart of higher cognitive functions such as/nlanguage. Research with animals has shown that various species can extract/nrather complex patterns from the input, as well as establish abstract/nsame/different relations. However, much of these findings have been/nobserved after extensive training procedures. Here, we tested rats’ capacity/nto discriminate and generalize tone triplets that entailed a repetition from/ntriplets that followed an ordinal, non-repeating pattern following a relatively/nshort discrimination training procedure in a water T-maze. Our findings/ndemonstrate that, under this procedure and after only 12 sessions, rats can/nlearn to discriminate both patterns when a reliable difference in pitch/nvariations is present across them (Experiment 1). When differences in pitch/nare eliminated (Experiment 2), no discrimination between patterns is found./nResults suggest a procedure based on a water T-maze might be used to/nexplore discrimination of acoustic patterns in rodents.