Pretest cuing after forgetting of a food-motivated maze task in rats: Synergistic action of context and reinforcement

It is now well known in animal studies that spontaneous forgetting, as well as performance decrements resulting from other sources, can be alleviated by means of pretest treatments. Several previous experiments have shown that reliable forgetting is observed after a 25-day training-to-test interval on a relatively complex maze. This forgetting can be alleviated by pretest exposure to background stimuli in the experimental room. The effects of this treatment can be modulated by varying either the duration of the treatment or the length of the cuing-test interval. The purpose of the experiment presented here was twofold: (1) to demonstrate the multidimensionality of memories in our paradigm by comparing the effects of different reminder treatments, namely pretest access to the reinforcer and contextual cuing, and (2) to test the general hypothesis, formulated by Spear (1978, p. 418), that “the elicitation and retrieval of the target attribute of a memory depend on the arousal of a sufficientnumber or kind of the remaining attributes of this memory.” The data showed that pretest food reinforcement had no significant effect on retention performance; that pretest contextual cuing did, in some precise conditions, alleviate forgetting; and that some combinations of context and reinforcement had what amounted to a synergistic action on retention performance.