中 華 心 理 學 刊
民92，45卷，3期，243-262
Jian-You Lin（Department of Psychology National Cheng-Chi University Taipei 116, Taiwan）；Ruey-Ming Liao（Department of Psychology National Cheng-Chi University Taipei 116, Taiwan）
Abstract
In order to investigate the potential differences between the spatial behavior derived from the guidance and the orientation hypotheses in the taxon system (O’Keefe & Nadel, 1978), the present study examined the behavioral performance in the radial eight-arm maze in rats under lithium chloride (LiCl) devaluation and context stimulus alteration. Food-deprived rats were separately trained to perform in the cue-learning and egocentric tasks in maze. The cue-learning task required the subject to enter two randomly chosen (out of eight) arms each cued with a piece of sandpaper on the arm entrance. When only four arms were used, the egocentric task required the subject to start from the end of a randomly chosen arm and turned into a baited arm with a specific direction of 90° . After reaching the baseline level, behavioral measures on two tasks were conducted first under the response probe test of the context stimulus alteration and followed by the LiCl devaluation procedure. Removal of sandpaper significantly enhanced the time the rat stayed on the central platform of the maze before entering the arms in the cue-learning task. In contrast, performance on the egocentric task remained intact when the starting point was shifted. The incentive value of the reinforcer baited in the maze was clearly reduced by the LiCl devaluation procedure. This manipulation significantly impaired performance on the egocentric task by decreasing the percent of correct choice and increasing the time to complete the task. In contrast, the performance on cue-learning task was not affected by LiCl devaluation. Together, these data indicate that the rats acquire the cue-learning and egocentric tasks based on the learning associations of stimulus-response (S-R) and response-reinforcement (R-S*), respectively. It is suggested that the guidance and orientation can be the two hypothetical strategies the different spatial behaviors in the taxon system.
Keywords：cue learning, egocentric, behavioral component, association learning, radial eight-armmaze, rat
