Animals in psychological research
Clive R. Hollin in An Introduction to Human–Animal Relationships, 2021
Skinner's main body of research was conducted with rats. In order to study the rat's behaviour, he developed a contained environment, an operant conditioning chamber, now known as a Skinner box, which allowed the experimenter to control and manipulate environmental conditions and observe the rat's behaviour (see Figure 1.3).
Prenatally stress-exposed male rats present lower theta prefrontal activity during attention behaviors to receptive females
Published in Stress, 2021
Marisela Hernández-González, Rodrigo Maldonado, Enrique Hernández-Arteaga, Miguel Angel Guevara
Prenatal stress affects cognitive functions in adult rats (Vallée et al., 1999), including attention (Wilson et al., 2012), learning (Lemaire et al., 2000), and memory, as a result of altered hippocampal development (Szuran et al., 2000). Wilson et al. (2012), for example, evaluated the effects of prenatal stress on selective attention in an operant conditioning chamber where rats had to perform a nose poke depending on the light stimulus presented. Those authors found that the prenatally-stressed rats had a lower percentage of correct responses, associated with damage in the selective attention paid to the stimulus. Taken together, these facts allow the suggestion that the stress-exposed rats in our study suffered deleterious changes in their cognitive functions that resulted in an inadequate capacity to process the incentive stimuli. For this reason, they were unable to recognize the female as a rewarding stimulus and so failed to reach sexual incentive motivation and adequate sexual activation (non-contact erections). This hypothesis, however, also requires additional analysis.
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