Conditioning induced by a drug

32

Conditioning Induced by a Drug

Juan D. Delius (University of Konstanz, Germany)

That the administration of drugs may act either as an eliciting, a reinforcing or a discriminative stimulus is well known. A rather special situation arises when the same dose of a given drug exerts all these effects simultaneously. Birds given apomorphine, a potent agonist of the neurotransmitter dopamine, respond with a prolonged bout of pecking. This unconditioned response can be linked to contingent environmental cues so that these by themselves come to yield a conditioned pecking response. Birds also show a marked preference to revisit a cage in which they have received apomorphine rather than one were they have received saline: the drug functions as a reinforcer. Furthermore, much as amphetamine and cocaine do, the repeated administration of a given dose of apomorphine yields a sensitization effect, that is a marked response increase. This incremental response is under a precise control by environmental stimuli. It will be shown that this context-dependent sensitization effect is an instance of respondent conditioning in which the drug itself is a conditioned stimulus element. The potentials of this drug-induced conditioning model will nevertheless be discussed with regard to the dopamino- glutamatergic synaptic interactions processes that are thought to underlie operant conditioning.

Keller, S. & Delius, J.D. (2001). Discriml:native learning occasioned by the administration of a dopamine agonist. Psychophannacol. 157: 320- 323.

Acerbo, MI, Lee,

J.

Brain Res. 151,201-208.

Ersch. in: Behaviour analysis in Europe : proceedings of the third Conference of the European association for behaviour analysis ; Milan, 18th-21st July, 2006 / eds. Roberto Truzoli, Geraldine Leader, Phil Reed. - Trento : UNI service, 2006. - S. 32. - ISBN

978-88-88859-99-6

Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS) URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-206736