Negative priming and occasion setting in an appetitive Pavlovian procedure

Abstract

Rats received training in which two auditory target stimuli, X and Y, were signaled by two visual stimuli, A and B, and followed by food (i.e., A-->X+, B-->Y+). The test consisted of presentations of X and Y preceded either by the same signal as during training (same trials: A-->X, B-->Y) or by the alternative signal (different trials: A-->Y, B-->X). After 8 training sessions, the animals responded less on same trials than on different trials; this effect was significantly reduced after 24 training sessions. In two additional experiments, animals that had also experienced presentations of A and B alone, either before or during training, showed the opposite pattern of results, responding more on same trials than on different trials. These results are interpreted as being due to the interaction between the effects of occasion setting and negative priming (see Wagner, 1981).

The effect of the amount of blocking cue training on blocking of appetitive conditioning in mice

“…Therefore, when a stimulus is presented in a context in which it is predicted it acquires conditioned responding less readily than when it is not predicted. Second, a signalled CS evokes weaker conditioned responding than an unsignalled CS ( Honey et al, 1993 , Mondragon et al, 2003 ). Third, more frequently experienced CSs receive less attention than less frequently experienced CSs ( Jones and Haselgrove, 2013 ), suggesting that how well the CS is predicted determines the level of processing that it receives.…”

Computational Models of Learning and Beyond

“…To start with, the very idea of associative learning can be nicely expressed as morphisms (associations) defined over objects (stimuli or nodes), that is, as categories; 2. Building iteratively up categories may allow us to gain knowledge about hierarchical processes -associative processes between associative processes (Bonardi, 2001;Mondragón, Bonardi and Hall, 2003), in particular, about the role of context and occasion setters (Bouton, 1994); 3. Also, the isomorphisms that define groupoids (unlike all or nothing equivalence relations that define groups) permit us to introduce partial symmetries that may explain results where novel compounds seem to elicit less response than the original trained compounds but more than each separate element; 4.…”