Facilitation and nonfacilitation of active avoidance behavior of rats with septal lesions in the shuttle box and running wheel.

It was hypothesized that facilitation of avoidance performance of rats with septal lesions occurs only in tasks that punish responses having the same topography as the avoidance response, such as intertrial responses, or tasks that have aversive consequences for making the avoidance response, such as a brightly illuminated safe compartment. Twenty-eight male rats were trained in two shuttle box tasks, and 24 were trained in two running-wheel avoidance tasks under conditions of punishment or nonpunishment of intertrial responses. Rats with septal lesions performed better than control rats in both the shuttle box and the wheel tasks when intertrial responses were punished. When intertrial responding was not punished, experimental and control groups did not differ in avoidance performance. Avoidance performance of punished and unpunished rats with septal lesions did not differ from each other or from unpunished control rats in either wheel or shuttle box tasks. These results were discussed in the context of the species-specific defense reaction (SSDR) avoidance theory of Bolles. It was suggested that septal lesions interfere with the suppression of ineffective SSDRs.