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The Combination of Appetitive and Aversive Reinforcers and the Nature of Their Interaction During Auditory Learning by Ilango et al. (2010)

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The Combination of Appetitive and Aversive Reinforcers and the Nature of Their Interaction During Auditory Learning by Ilango et al. (2010)

The Combination of Appetitive and Aversive Reinforcers and the Nature of Their Interaction During Auditory Learning by Ilango et al. (2010)

Publication

A. Ilango, W. Wetzel, H. Scheich, and F. W. Ohl. The Combination of Appetitive and Aversive Reinforcers and the Nature of Their Interaction During Auditory Learning. Neuroscience 166:752–762 (2010). [15]

DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2010.01.010

Site summary — not the original abstract

Ilango and colleagues tested tone-cued hurdle crossing in Mongolian gerbils, using footshock avoidance, rewarding electrical stimulation of the ventral tegmental area, or both; the combined condition accelerated acquisition and delayed extinction relative to either reinforcer alone. [15]

The omission results depended on the schedule: after continuously reinforced training, removing brain-stimulation reward briefly reduced performance while removing footshock did not; after partially reinforced training, removing footshock reduced responding while removing reward did not. [15]

These are results from a specific laboratory task with brain stimulation, not a comparison of dog-training methods or evidence that combining reward and aversive procedures is universally superior. [15]