Rick presented an experiment in Lecture 3.3 ("Are You Experienced?") about the impacts of cocaine on sexual behaviour. What did the authors find?

Question

BlackTom AI · Accepted Answer

Pavlovian conditioning and extinction are central here: a conditioned stimulus (CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US; in this case sexual opportunity) so that animals learn to approach the CS. During extinction the CS is repeatedly presented without the US and the conditioned approach declines. Dopamine-dependent processes mediate reward learning and also influence extinction; psychostimulants like cocaine can alter these processes and thus change how animals learn or unlearn cue–reward associations.

Step-by-step reasoning from the study design and findings:
1. Training phase: male quails received pairings of a specific cue (CS) with access to a sexual partner (US). They learned an approach response to that cue.
2. Extinction phase: the CS was thereafter presented without sex. In intact animals this causes a gradual decline in approach behavior (extinction).
3. Experimental manipulation: some males were exposed to cocaine (either during learning, prior exposure, or around extinction; the lecture described cocaine’s impact on cue-driven sexual responding).
4. Observed outcome: cocaine-exposed male quails continued to show approach to the CS despite the absence of the sexual reward — they failed to extinguish the conditioned approach. This indicates cocaine disrupted extinction (or enhanced persistence of cue-driven approach), consistent with cocaine’s effects on reward-related learning and motivational salience.

Why option C is correct: it precisely matches the observed behavioral pattern (failure to extinguish approach to a previously sex-predictive CS) in the species used (male quails) and implicates cocaine’s effect on cue-controlled sexual responding.

Why the other options are incorrect:
- A describes premature habituation in male rats (wrong effect and wrong species).
- B claims loss of interest in the CS (the opposite of the reported perseverative approach).
- D states reduced siring of offspring in male rats (a different measure, species, and not the reported finding).

Therefore the correct choice is: c. Cocaine-exposed male quails failed to extinguish an approach response to a CS that had previously predicted sex. This matches the provided answer.

Rick presented an experiment in Lecture 3.3 ("Are You Experienced?") about the impacts of cocaine on sexual behaviour. What did the authors find?Single choice

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