Response events as well as goal events as sources of animal memory

Current approaches emphasize the control exercised over behavior by various internal stimuli arising from goal events such as reward and nonreward. In contrast, certain earlier views emphasized the behavioral control exercised by internal stimuli arising from responding. The purpose of the three experiments reported here was to determine if stimuli arising both from goal events and from response events control instrumental behavior, and, if so, how much behavioral control is exercised by each. In the three experiments reported, rats received partial reinforcement in a runway either at a 24-h ITI or at both a 24-h ITI and a shorter ITI (2 min, 15 min, 30 min, or 1 h), with extinction always occurring at the shorter ITI. The results suggest that both goal-produced and response-produced internal stimuli control behavior simultaneously. Too, it was found that at ITIs as long as 30 min, response-produced cues regulate responding about as strongly as goal-produced cues.