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Shock Intensity And Task Difficulty As Determiners Of Avoidance And Escape Learning In Rats, Arthur Louis
Shock Intensity And Task Difficulty As Determiners Of Avoidance And Escape Learning In Rats, Arthur Louis
Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)
Thirty-six naive female hooded rats were divided randomly into three groups and tested in an instrumental escape and avoidance learning situation involving three degrees of task difficulty. Each group was also randomly subdivided into four subgroups, each of which underwent a different shock intensity level. The purpose of this study was to test the Yorkes-Dodson law which states that (a) there is an optimal level of punishment intensity for any given task (or an inverted-U curve relating shock intensity and performance) and (b) this optimal intensity decreases as task difficulty increases. The results supported (a) but not (b).