In this case it is the flavour of the water that rats find difficult to associate with the shock; punishing rats with a mild shock whenever they drink sugar-flavoured water has little effect on their tendency to drink sugar-flavoured water.
To associate these images with a negative experience, half the images of both races were paired with a mild shock.
He and his collaborators first put the mice in a chamber where the animals heard a tone, then followed up the tone with a mild shock.
In one study, rats were trained to fear a particular context (cage) or a cue (white light) by pairing them with a mild shock.
In the experiment, conducted at New York University, volunteers were conditioned to be afraid of blue squares flashing on a computer screen when the sight was paired with a mild shock to the wrist.
They taught mice to associate a tone with a mild shock and found that, once the mice learned the association, the pattern of neurons that activated in response to tone alone resembled the pattern that activated in response to the shock.
If a rat has been trained to associate a certain sound with a mild shock to its tail, and the bell tolls but the shock doesn't come, the rat will inhale deeply with what can only be called a sigh of relief.
The researchers trained the rodents to associate a particular chamber with a mild shock.
Jacek Dębiec, a neurobiologist at New York University, conditioned rats to fear a tone by pairing it with a mild shock.
To investigate, Lee, Casey, and other colleagues led by graduate student Fatima Soliman trained both mice and people to associate either a tone (for the mice) or a colored square (for the humans) with a mild shock.
