Latent inhibition in honeybees

Aversive conditioning was studied in individual honeybees flying back and forth between the hive and the sill of an open laboratory window, where they took sucrose solution from a target so constructed that shock could be delivered while the proboscis was in contact with the solution. During feeding, a conditioned stimulus—substrate vibration or airstream—was paired with brief shock avoidable by interruption of feeding. In Experiment 1, unreinforced preexposure of the conditioned stimulus was found to retard acquisition (latent inhibition). In Experiment 2, which was designed to inquire into the stimulus specificity of the effect, differential conditioning was found to be impaired by unreinforced preexposure of the positive stimulus and facilitated by unreinforced preexposure of the negative stimulus. In Experiment 3, a summation experiment designed to test various alternative explanations of the effect, a preexposed stimulus was found to suppress response to an excitatory conditioned stimulus when the two stimuli were presented together.