Blocking in Pavlovian conditioning: effect of prior excitatory conditioning to a stimulus extraneous to compound conditioning.
The effect of prior excitatory conditioning to a stimulus not included in the compound conditioning phase of the typical blocking experiment was assessed in three CER studies. The first experiment, in which rat subjects received A+, C+, or a combination of A+/C+ trials prior to AB+ conditioning, showed that A+/C+ or C+ training produced as robust blocking as A+ training relative to a control group with no prior conditioning. A second experiment which was designed to assess the role of background cues in mediating the blocking effect indicated that background cues were not responsible for the A+ or C+ effects, while a third experiment showed these same effects were not mediated by stimulus generalization. The findings of these experiments are interpreted in the context of pseudoconditioning-induced rehearsal of a US representation in short-term memory.
DeVito
P L
PL
Department of Psychology, Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, PA 19131.
Cashman
L
L
Petka
K
K
D000818:Animals; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley