Transfer across reward devaluation tasks in inbred Roman rat strains

Emotional counterconditioning resulting from pairings between a state of frustration and food reward explains transfer across situations involving reward omission. This experiment explored the hypothesis that a similar emotional counterconditioning mechanism is also involved in recovery from reward devaluation. Inbred Roman high- and low-avoidance rat strains (RHA-I and RLA-I) were trained in consummatory and instrumental successive negative contrast tasks (cSNC and iSNC) in counterbalanced order. RLA-I rats have consistently shown high levels of anxiety in a variety of situations, relative to RHA-I rats. Therefore, a stronger evidence of transfer was expected in RLA-I rats than in RHA-I rats. Whereas both strains showed the effects in the original training phase, only RLA-I rats benefitted from prior exposure to one reward devaluation task. The transfer was positive and symmetrical (i.e., exposure to one SNC task attenuated the second effect). RHA-I rats produced no evidence of transfer. The results suggest that emotional counterconditioning is involved in recovery from reward devaluation tasks. Despite extensive psychogenetic selection for low-avoidance/high-anxiety behavior, RLA-I rats showed the ability to develop resilience as a function of prior experience.