title: Roles of context in acquisition of human instrumental learning: Implications for the understanding of the mechanisms underlying context-switch effects.
abstract: Four experiments in human instrumental learning explored the associations involving the context that develop after three trials of training on simple discriminations. Experiments 1 and 4 found a deleterious effect of switching the learning context that cannot be explained by the context-outcome binary associations commonly used to explain context-switch effects after short training in human predictive learning and in animal Pavlovian conditioning. Evidence for context-outcome (Experiment 2), context-discriminative stimulus (Experiment 3), and context-instrumental response (Experiment 4) binary associations was found within the same training paradigm, suggesting that contexts became associated with all the elements of the situation, regardless of whether those associations played a role in a specific context-switch effect detected on performance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Jaén, 23071, Jaén, Spain.|University of Cádiz, Cádiz, Spain.
authors.forename: A Matías
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Gámez
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Jaén, 23071, Jaén, Spain.
authors.forename: Samuel P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: León
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Universidad de Jaén, 23071, Jaén, Spain. jmrosas@ujaen.es.
authors.forename: Juan M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Rosas
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D004777:Environment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Contents of learning; Context-switch; Humans; Instrumental conditioning