Comparação entre animais desnutridos e controle em procedimento para o estabelecimento de discriminações complexas em ratos / Comparison between malnourished and control animals in procedure for the establishment of complex discriminations in rats.

AUTOR(ES)

Edson Mello da Silva

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2010

RESUMO

Early malnutrition leads to serious deleterious effects on growth, behavior and cognitive abilities of rats and children. Protein malnutrition is the main nutritional failure that can be examined individually in experimental studies. The aim of this study was to establish conditional discriminations in rats by comparing control animals with early malnourished animals which have received nutritional recovery and to test three changes in the procedure used by Feliciano (2007). As changes were employed a greater number of simple discrimination reversals, before the conditional discrimination training and the the procedures of fading correction. In experiment 1, we tested the procedure of fading and the discrimination reversals. In the experiment 2, the discrimination reversals were tested along with the correction procedure, but preveiously malnourished animals were not used. Finally, in experiment 3 the animals were tested only in the conditional discrimination with or without the correction procedure. At the end of reversals control and malnourished rats showed the same learning speed. At the end of the duration of the fading procedure the performance characteristics of learning without errors was not maintained, indicating that the fading procedure was not used efficiently. Correction facilitated the learning of simple discrimination and improved animal performance. There was no learning curve for the conditional discrimination in all experiments, yet at the end of training the performance of the animals subjected to correction procedure was better than the performance of rats subjected only to fading, or that of animals not submitted to any procedures. Among the factors that have prevented the learning of the conditional discrimination by the rats, we highlight the programmed contingency, the random spatial arrangement of the choice stimuli and the existence of more than two alternatives for the responses.

ASSUNTO(S)

aprendizagem conditional discrimination correção correction desnutrição protéica precoce discriminação condicional early protein malnutrition fading fading. learning.

Documentos Relacionados

• Investigações sobre discriminações simples e discriminações condicionais em abelhas
• A COMPARISON BETWEEN METHODS FOR THE DISCRETIZATION OF CONTROL STRUCTURES
• Um procedimento para medir o estabelecimento de controle de estímulos em uma discriminação simples, baseado em Touchette (1971)
• Um procedimento para medir o estabelecimento de controle de estímulos em uma discriminação simples, baseado em Touchette (1971)
• Um procedimento para medir o estabelecimento de controle de estímulos em uma discriminação simples, baseado em Touchette (1971)