Lowell H. Storms

Punishment Inhibits an Instrumental Response in Hooded Rats

Punishment led to the cessation of a food-rewarded bar-pressing response in hooded rats deprived of food for 23 hours. The response remained inhibited for 2 weeks, and only one of four rats resumed responding when food deprivation was increased to 47 and 71 hours.

Recovery from punishment of bar pressing maintained on fixed and variable interval reward schedules

Twenty-four rats maintained on 2 min. FI food reward and 24 on 2 min. VI reward were shocked for every bar-pressing response until responding ceased. Shock durations were.1,.2,.4,.8, 1.6, and 3.2 sec., with four Ss from each group assigned to each duration. The reinforcement schedules did not differ in number of shocks required to produce suppression of responding. However, 2 weeks later in 3 retest sessions with reward but without punishment, the effects of punishment were more durable for the VI than for the FI schedule. Recovery of FI responding was a monotonic decreasing function of shock duration, while the least recovery of VI responding occurred at an intermediate duration, 4 sec.