Both motivational and training factors affect response conflict choice performance in rats

Rats were trained on two biconditional discrimination tasks, in two different contexts, and were rewarded with two different outcomes. At test, they received presentations of audiovisual compounds of these training stimuli, in extinction. These compounds were formed in such way that the individual elements had dictated either the same (congruent trials) or different (incongruent trials) responses during training, and each stimulus element had previously been rewarded with a different outcome. Previous research has shown that rats use the contextual cues to disambiguate the conflicting response information provided by incongruent stimulus compounds. Experiment 1 demonstrated that this contextual control was goal-directed in the sense that it depended on the current value of the outcome and Experiment 2 demonstrated that both the training history of the biconditional stimuli and motivational influences influenced the contextual control of responding on incongruent trials. These results are discussed in relation to current models of choice behaviour.