Learned Avoidance of Nonreward

Abstract

The use of animal behavior to assess the effects of potentially harmful environments depends upon the extent of our understanding of the animals' behavior in normal environments. The object of the present paper was to elucidate one mechanism of discrimination behavior, the avoidance of nonrewarding stimuli. Three experiments were conducted. In the first two, the performance of naive and discrimination-test sophisticated monkeys group, the naive animals showed no avoidance of nonrewarding stimuli. In the third experiment it was shown that this response is acuqired during the establishment of a learning set. A critical response in discrimination performance, avoidance of nonrewarding stimuli, is absent in naive monkeys. It is learned, however, during the establishment of a learning set. The absence of this response probably accounts for the inferior performance of naive monkeys in discrimination learning. (Author)