Association for Behavior Analysis International

Mexican Network for Research on Animal Behavior is a psychological research group with the following objectives: (a) promote the development of scientific research on animal behavior in Mexico, (b) contribute to the training of high-level human resources on animal behavior research, (c) sharing different kinds of research resources, (d) promote the inter-institutional exchange of researchers as well as students, and (e) organize an annual event in which our members could release their research objectives in order to increase people's interest on animal behavior research. In this context, the talks in the present symposium are about the experimental analysis of associative learning and operant behavior. Our principal objective is to release some Mexican research interests to the international behavior analysis community.

Several theorists have asserted that performance on choice procedures is controlled to some extent by cues that predict rewards. This includes intertemporal choice procedures, which are extensively used as a paradigm to study self-control. The basic assumption is that those cues acquire a secondary reward function via its temporal and statistical (i.e., Pavlovian) relation to primary reward delivery. Numerous studies have demonstrated that such cues have an effect independent of primary rewards and that both are commensurable. Therefore, most of the time choice behavior may be the result of a joint contribution of primary and secondary rewards. The possibility of the contribution of cues negatively associated with reward, functioning as conditioned aversive stimuli, has not been explored yet. Our line of research aims to assess whether creating a history in which a cue is negatively related to the delivery of reward has an aversive effect when that cue is later added to SS alternative in an intertemporal choice procedure, promoting less preference for that alternative.

In this line of research we devised a technique for the study of serial recall of lists of demonstrators in food preference, a social behavior paradigm. We have studied the typical result in list recall, primacy and recency depending on several parameter values. We also have found the vonRestorff effect when an outstanding element was presented in the middle position. We have studied the effects of two anti-cholinergic drugs and an antagonist of the GABAb neurotransmitter. We will start studying the effect of hippocampus lesions soon. Within this line of research we have obtained financial support for 6 years. We have published two papers in the journal Learning & Behavior, one book and one chapter in another book. We have graduated one BA student and two MA students. We are now studying a new technique in which a list of different frequencies will be presented to rats in Med-Pc chambers.

When organisms are deprived of food and the reinforcement is available under intermittent conditions, subjects usually show orderly concurrent behaviors. These behaviors have been called induced or adjunctive and have been proposed as functionally different from respondents and operants. The prototypical example of adjunctive behavior is schedule-induced polydipsia. Recent studies using this experimental paradigm have suggested that adjunctive drinking do not represents a third class of behavior and that it could be integrate as a case of operant behavior (e.g., Avila & Bruner, 1994; Killen & Pellon, 2013). In this talk we will try to extend the same idea to the so-called schedule-induced activity. Such a possibility is supported by the observation of wheel-running patterns similar to those observed when lever-pressing or key-pecking are the target responses.