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The fate of redundant cues during blocking and a simple discrimination

Pearce, John Martindale ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6121-8650, Dopson, Jemma C., Haselgrove, Mark ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8981-1181 and Esber, Guillem R. 2012. The fate of redundant cues during blocking and a simple discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 38 (2) , pp. 167-179. 10.1037/a0027662

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Abstract

In each of three experiments animals received blocking, A+ AX+, in which food was always presented after one stimulus, A, that was occasionally accompanied by another stimulus, X. They also received a simple discrimination, AX+ BX−, in which the presence and absence of food was signaled by two compounds that contained one unique cue, A or B, and one common cue, X. In each of these designs, X can be said to be redundant relative to A as a signal for food. Test trials at the end of training revealed that responding during X was stronger after blocking than after the simple discrimination. These results contradict predictions from theories of learning that assume changes in associative strength of a stimulus are determined by a global error term based on the outcome predicted by all the stimuli that are present for a conditioning trial. The results are interpreted, instead, by assuming either that animals store a memory of every trial to which they have been exposed, or that learning is governed by an error term based on the significance of individual stimuli.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Publication
Status: Published
Schools: Psychology
Subjects: B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Publisher: American Psychological Association
ISSN: 1939-2184
Funders: BBSRC
Last Modified: 06 Nov 2022 14:05
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/28615

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