The role of motivational strength in latent learning.

Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence.

“…In everyday terms, a man hurrying to an important business conference is likely to perceive only the cues that help him to get there faster, whereas a man taking a stroll after lunch is likely to pick up a substantial amount of casual information about his environment. The latent learning experiments with animals, and experiments such as those of Johnson (1953) in which drive level has been systematically varied in a situation permitting incidental learning, give strong support to this general idea. In a recent contribution, Burner, Matter, and Papanek (1955) make a strong case for the concept of breadth of learning and provide additional evidence that it is favored by moderate and hampered by strong motivation.…”

The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior.

“…They had made fewer observing responses and presumedly therefore had made better use of the plainest cue for the food reward. Johnson (1952) had earlier found that the amount of latent learning displayed depended inversely on the strength of (thirst) drive used in the initial training period. Cues that were not required to gain the reward used in pretraining were evidently not used by the animals with the greater need for that reward.…”

“…Such a change is associated with improvement of central performance or with maintenance of proficiency under stress. The range of cue utilization is said to have fallen when the amount of incidental learning has been reduced although task learning has remained constant or been improved (Aborn, 1953;Bahrick, 1954;Bruner et al, 1955;Johnson, 1952;Kohn, 1954;Silverman, 1954;Silverman & Blitz, 1956). In general, the range of cue utilization is the total number of environmental cues in any situation that an organism observes, maintains an orientation towards, responds to, or associates with a response.…”

A transfer of control test for contextual associations

“…Furthermore, the truly random paradigm was the most stressful of the three conditioning paradigms, since dogs in this group received more shocks and since completely unpredictable shocks (i.e., unsignaled shocks with no signaled safety periods) are known to be more stressful than predictable shocks (e.g., Weiss, 1971;see Weinberg & Levine, 1980, for a review). There is a considerable theoretical (e.g., Bruner, Matter, & Papanek, 1955;Tolman, 1948) and empirical (e.g., Johnson, 1953;Spence & Lippit, 1940)literature that suggests that, in circumstances of extreme stress, an CONTEXTUAL ASSOCIATIONS 319 organism narrows its attentional field to the most salient cues in the environment (for reviews, see Easterbrook, 1959;Melton, 1950;Thistlethwaite, 1951). Other cues, such as some contextual ones, may be functionally ignored and thus may not gain associative strength even when they are correlated with reinforcement.…”