Contemporary Study of Pavlovian Conditioning

Abstract

Pavlov's first report on conditioning emphasized its role in allowing the animal to adjust to its environment. Contemporary theories have seen this adjustment in terms of developing accurate knowledge of the environment. Three aspects of that thinking are explored: how the animal acquires initial knowledge, how it changes its knowledge when conditions of the world change, and how it makes use of multiple knowledge representations. Keywords: error correction, overexpectation, superconditioning, extinction, modulation, Rescorla-Wagner model El primer informe de Pavlov sobre el condicionamiento subrayaba su función para la adaptación al ambiente. Las teorías contemporáneas han contemplado esta adaptación en términos del desarrollo de un conocimiento adecuado del medio ambiente. Se exploran tres aspectos de esa línea de pensamiento: cómo el animal adquiere el conocimiento inicial, cómo modifica su conocimiento cuando cambian las condiciones del medio y cómo hace uso de representaciones múltiples del conocimiento. Palabras clave: corrección de errores, sobreespectativa, supercondicionamiento, extinción, modulación, modelo de Rescorla-Wagner

A Bio-Logical Theory of Animal Learning

“…This prediction agrees with experimental data from various authors (e.g., Lattal and Nakajima 1998;Rescorla 2003a) and conforms to what elemental theories call "overexpectation." The second example is from Rescorla (2003b).…”

“…Two main categories exist at present (Wagner 2003): the associative theories of learning, consisting themselves of the elemental theories of learning (e.g., Atkinson and Estes 1963;Rescorla and Wagner 1972) and the configural theories of Pavlovian conditioning (e.g., Pearce 1987; for review see Pearce and Bouton 2001), and the nonassociative theories of learning (e.g., Gallistel 1990). However, despite their impressive predictive abilities, problems still exist (e.g., Miller et al 1995;Goddard 2003;Haselgrove et al 2004), prompting for their continued improvement and the proposal of new theories that can successfully predict phenomena such as overexpectation (Lattal and Nakajima 1998), superconditioning (Rescorla 2003a), and external inhibition, as well as currently unpredicted phenomena such as extinction renewal (Pearce and Bouton 2001) and novelty detection.…”

Connectionism and Classical Conditioning

“…However, there are many phenomena that it fails to explain (Miller et al, 1995). As a result, there have been a number of attempts to update it, or to provide alternatives to it (Krushke, 2001(Krushke, , 2003Mackintosh, 1975;Pearce, 2002;Pearce & Hall, 1980;Rescorla, 2003;Wagner, 2003).…”

“…One important issue concerns how animals process compound stimuli. One approach to this issue is elemental (Rescorla, 1973(Rescorla, , 1988(Rescorla, , 2003Rescorla & Wagner, 1972;Wagner, 2003): animals independently process the elemental components that define a compound stimulus.…”

Demonstration of cue recruitment: Change in visual appearance by means of Pavlovian conditioning

“…A simple form of such learning is to recruit a new signal to elicit an existing response (at some level within the nervous system) after noting the temporal co-occurrence of activity caused by the signal and activity that represents the response (9,19). The contemporary view is that learning by association is a method for acquiring knowledge about the world (20), and in principle this learning could include knowledge about how visually measured signals are related to states of the world.…”