Social Learning of the Fear Potentiated Startle Task and Two-way Active Avoidance Task in Rats
Date Issued
2013
Date
2013
Author(s)
Lai, Szu-Yu
Abstract
Animals can learn and change their behavior directly through interacting with the world around them, which is commonly known as individual or self learning. Also, they can learn from simply observing or interacting with another animal, which is denoted as social learning. Social learning is a very useful way for adaptation because animal can learn without experiencing potential danger, which is extremely important for its survival. However, experimental models for socially acquired fear have not yet been well established for laboratory animals. This thesis intended to build a model for social/observational learning by using fear potentiated startle and two-way active avoidance tasks, of which the neural mechanisms have been well documented in the literature. In the fear potentiated startle task, Wistar rats observed a conspecific being shocked along with light and was subsequently tested directly for startle potentiation caused by the light, or for saving on a self-experienced paradigm to relearning the same task. The results showed that, in the direct test, rats with pure observation experience showed no significant behavior change compared with control group in response to the warning signal. But the arousal level of observers conditioned to the context (as indicated by the difference of startle elicited in the context before and after observation) was higher than that of controls after the observation experience. Similar results were also obtained in rats tested for saving in a self-learning paradigm given 1 day after observation. However, if the observing rats received the saving test 2 months later, they did show higher fear potentiated startle responses to moderate noise bursts in the presence of light, suggesting the observation created saving long time after the experience. In the two-way active avoidance task, the observer rat either observed a novice to demonstrate at the early stage of learning (the first two days), or an expert to demonstrate at the final stage of learning (the last two days). The results showed that rats who observed a novice-demonstrator showed higher learning speed than both the control and expert-observation groups when they experienced self-learning in a saving paradigm. In this research we have built a model for social/observational learning by using fear potentiated startle and two-way active avoidance tasks, and rats could change their behavior by observing others only if some condition has been satisfied. These observational learning models can become foundation for the research of neural mechanism for observation learning.
Subjects
恐懼增益驚跳反應作業
主動躲避作業
社會學習
觀察學習
模仿
Type
thesis
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