title: Recency-to-primacy shift in cue competition.
abstract: Three experiments were conducted using a lick-suppression preparation with rats to determine whether temporal and physical context shifts modulate the effectiveness of 2 sequentially trained blocking stimuli. Experiment 1 ascertained that it is possible to obtain blocking by conditioning rats to react to a target cue using 2 different blocking cues, each trained with a single-phase blocking paradigm. Experiment 2 showed that the more recently trained blocking stimulus was more effective (i.e., showed a recency effect) when testing was conducted immediately after training, but a long retention interval attenuated blocking by the most recently trained blocking stimulus and increased blocking by the initially trained blocking stimulus (i.e., a recency-to-primacy shift). This shift from recency to primacy affected in Experiment 2 by varying the retention interval was replicated in Experiment 3 by changing the physical context between training and testing. Taken together, the results indicate that the effectiveness of sequentially trained competing stimuli follows the same recency-to-primacy shift rule that is seen in traditional interference phenomena.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000, USA.
authors.forename: Olga
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Lipatova
authors.forename: Daniel S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Wheeler
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Vadillo
authors.forename: Ralph R
authors.initials: RR
authors.lastname: Miller
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D003163:Competitive Behavior; D003214:Conditioning, Classical / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D005108:Extinction, Psychological; D005260:Female; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation; D051381:Rats; D017207:Rats, Sprague-Dawley; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D013997:Time Factors