Pavlovian conditioning under partial reinforcement: The effects of nonreinforced trials versus cumulative conditioned stimulus duration.

Pavlovian conditioning is sensitive to the temporal relationship between conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US). This has motivated models that describe learning as a process that continuously updates associative strength during the trial or specifically encodes the CS-US interval. These models predict that extinction of responding is also continuous, such that response loss is proportional to the cumulative duration of exposure to the CS without the US. We review evidence showing that this prediction is incorrect, and that extinction is trial-based rather than time-based. We also present two experiments that test the importance of trials versus time on the Partial Reinforcement Extinction Effect (PREE), in which responding extinguishes more slowly for a CS that was inconsistently reinforced with the US than for a consistently reinforced one. We show that increasing the number of extinction trials of the partially reinforced CS, relative to the consistently reinforced CS, overcomes the PREE. However, increasing the duration of extinction trials by the same amount does not overcome the PREE. We conclude that animals learn about the likelihood of the US per trial during conditioning, and learn trial-by-trial about the absence of the US during extinction. Moreover, what they learn about the likelihood of the US during conditioning affects how sensitive they are to the absence of the US during extinction.

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Facilitation of shuttle-box avoidance by the platform method: Effects of conditioned stimulus duration

Physiology & Behavior ◽

10.1016/0031-9384(93)90216-3 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 53 (2) ◽

pp. 349-352 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Margalida Coll-Andreu ◽

Margarita Marti-Nicolovius ◽

Isabel Portell-Cortes ◽

Ignacio Morgado-Bernal

Keyword(s):

Conditioned Stimulus ◽

Stimulus Duration ◽

Shuttle Box ◽

Method Effects ◽

Conditioned Stimulus Duration

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Impairment of two-way active avoidance after pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus lesions: effects of conditioned stimulus duration

Behavioural Brain Research ◽

10.1016/s0166-4328(00)00306-5 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 118 (1) ◽

pp. 1-9 ◽

Cited By ~ 15

Author(s):

Núria Satorra-Marı́n ◽

Margalida Coll-Andreu ◽

Isabel Portell-Cortés ◽

Laura Aldavert-Vera ◽

Ignacio Morgado-Bernal

Keyword(s):

Conditioned Stimulus ◽

Stimulus Duration ◽

Active Avoidance ◽

Pedunculopontine Tegmental Nucleus ◽

Tegmental Nucleus ◽

Conditioned Stimulus Duration

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Learned Irrelevance and Retrospective Correlation Learning

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section B ◽

10.1080/02724990244000197 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 56 (1b) ◽

pp. 90-101 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

A. G. Baker ◽

Robin A. Murphy ◽

Rick Mehta

Keyword(s):

Conditioned Stimulus ◽

Pavlovian Conditioning ◽

Learning Process ◽

Interference Effect ◽

Unconditional Stimulus ◽

Contingency Learning ◽

Correlation Learning ◽

Learned Irrelevance

In 1973 Mackintosh reported an interference effect that he called learned irrelevance in which exposure to uncorrelated (CS/US) presentation of the unconditional stimulus (US) and the conditioned stimulus (CS) interfered with future Pavlovian conditioning. It has been argued that there is no specific interference effect in learned irrelevance; rather the interference is the sum of independent CS and US exposure effects (CS + US). We review previous research on this question and report two new experiments. We conclude that learned irrelevance is a consequence of a contingency learning and a specific learned irrelevance mechanism. Moreover even the “independent exposure controls”, used in previous experiments to support the CS and US exposure account, provide support for the correlation learning process.

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Higher-Order Conditioning With Simultaneous and Backward Conditioned Stimulus: Implications for Models of Pavlovian Conditioning

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience ◽

10.3389/fnbeh.2021.749517 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

Author(s):

Arthur Prével ◽

Ruth M. Krebs

Keyword(s):

Conditioned Stimulus ◽

Pavlovian Conditioning ◽

Temporal Structure ◽

Higher Order ◽

Prediction Errors ◽

Temporal Difference ◽

Conditioned Stimuli ◽

Form Complex ◽

Reward Prediction ◽

Order Conditioning

In a new environment, humans and animals can detect and learn that cues predict meaningful outcomes, and use this information to adapt their responses. This process is termed Pavlovian conditioning. Pavlovian conditioning is also observed for stimuli that predict outcome-associated cues; a second type of conditioning is termed higher-order Pavlovian conditioning. In this review, we will focus on higher-order conditioning studies with simultaneous and backward conditioned stimuli. We will examine how the results from these experiments pose a challenge to models of Pavlovian conditioning like the Temporal Difference (TD) models, in which learning is mainly driven by reward prediction errors. Contrasting with this view, the results suggest that humans and animals can form complex representations of the (temporal) structure of the task, and use this information to guide behavior, which seems consistent with model-based reinforcement learning. Future investigations involving these procedures could result in important new insights on the mechanisms that underlie Pavlovian conditioning.

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