Role of primary motivation in stimulus preexposure effects.
It is currently a matter of debate whether the deficit in conditioning observed after stimulus preexposure is one of acquisition or one of performance. The major criticism of performance-based theories is their inability to specify what is learned during nonreinforced preexposure that may influence subsequent acquisition of conditioned responding-Experiments 1 and 2 used an excitatory appetitive conditioning procedure and Experiment 3 used an inhibitory appetitive conditioning procedure, with rats as subjects, and consistently found that the effects of preexposure to a stimulus transferred to conditioning only when the reinforcer was relevant to the motivational state in which that preexposure was conducted. This finding suggests that during preexposure, rats learn that a stimulus is unrelated to events of relevance to their current motivational state.
Killcross
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Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, England.
Balleine
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B
D000818:Animals; D001522:Behavior, Animal; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation; D051381:Rats; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology