Factors Affecting Context Specificity of Appetitive Conditioned Responding

The present experiment contributes to the identification of factors affecting magnitude of context specificity of simple appetitive conditioned responding. Rats were first trained to associate an auditory and a visual stimulus with food. Each of these stimuli was consistently presented in a distinctive environmental context. Groups of rats differed only in the number of conditioning trials. At test, all groups received trials on which each of the stimuli was presented either in the same context as used during training, or in the different context. Rats made significantly fewer food-magazine visits on different-context trials than on same-context trials only under the conditions that the stimulus tested was the auditory stimulus, which generally elicited a stronger conditioned response (CR) than did the visual stimulus, and the animals had received a relatively small number of conditioning trials. Apparently, magnitude of context specificity is affected by factors determining the strength of the appetitive conditioned response to the target stimulus.