Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

The outcome predictability bias is evident in overt attention.
Previous studies of human associative learning have demonstrated that people’s experience with a cueing stimulus will change how that cue is treated during subsequent learning. Typically, studies have shown that people pay more attention to cues that were informative in the past, and learn new information about these cues more rapidly (these cues are said to have a higher associability). It has recently been shown that to-be-predicted events (outcomes) can also differ in their associability as a consequence of prior experience. However, to date there is no direct evidence that this change in associability is accompanied ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Cognitive and behavioral training interventions to promote self-control.
This review article discusses various cognitive and behavioral interventions that have been developed with the goal of promoting self-controlled responding. Self-control can exert a significant impact on human health and impulsive behaviors are associated with a wide range of diseases and disorders, leading to the suggestion that impulsivity is a trans-disease process. The self-control interventions include effort exposure, reward discrimination, reward bundling, interval schedules of reinforcement, impulse control training, and mindfulness training. Most of the interventions have been consistently shown to increase self-c...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Resurgence in humans: Reducing relapse by increasing generalization between treatment and testing.
Resurgence is the increase in performance of an extinguished instrumental (operant) response that accompanies the extinction of a response that has been reinforced to replace it. Resurgence may involve processes that are relevant for understanding relapse in applied and clinical settings. While resurgence is known to be a robust phenomenon in human operant extinction, the processes that control it remain unclear. Here we asked whether human resurgence is controlled by processes that are similar to those that have been identified in animals by asking whether two methods that reduce resurgence in animals also reduce it in hu...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 29, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Simultaneous versus prospective/retrospective uncertainty monitoring: The effect of response competition across cognitive levels.
Early animal-metacognition researchers singled out simultaneous metacognition paradigms for theoretical criticism, because these paradigms presented concretely rewarded perceptual responses and the metacognitive response simultaneously. This method potentially introduced associative cues into the situation that could confound the interpretation of the metacognitive response. Evaluating this possibility, we compared humans’ metacognitive performances in simultaneous and nonsimultaneous (prospective, retrospective) paradigms that were otherwise identical. Results show that the metacognition response in these tasks is not p...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 25, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Time-scale-invariant information-theoretic contingencies in discrimination learning.
Animals optimize their behavior to maximize rewards by utilizing cues from the environment. In discrimination learning, cues signal when rewards can and cannot be earned by making a particular response. In our experiment, we trained male mice to press a lever to receive a reward on a random interval schedule. We then introduced a prolonged tone (20, 40, or 80 sec), during which no rewards could be earned. We sought to test our hypothesis that the duration of the tone and frequency of reward during the inter-tone-intervals affect the informativeness of cues and led to differences in discriminative behavior. Learning was exp...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 25, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

A combination of common and individual error terms is not needed to explain associative changes when cues with different training histories are conditioned in compound: A review of Rescorla’s compound test procedure.
This article is in two parts. The first used simulations to show that a theory, such as Rescorla-Wagner, which just relies on a common error term, can explain the compound test data if the function that translates learning into performance is double-sigmoidal across the full range of associative strength (i.e., from inhibition through to excitation). The second part likewise used simulations to show that a theory, such as the comparator theory (Miller & Matzel, 1988), which does not invoke a common error term, can also explain the compound test data. Thus, a common error term is sufficient to explain the compound test data...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 4, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Timing or counting? Control by contingency reversals at fixed times or numbers of responses.
Behavior may come under the control of time or number when such cues predict food availability, but time tends to exert stronger control than does number. We asked how the control of behavior is divided between time and number in a procedure where the likely location of a reinforcer reversed systematically at a particular point in a trial. In Phase 1, we asked whether pigeons would choose to time or count when both time and number of responses could be used to discriminate the occurrence of the reversal. Pigeons preferred to time, even when numbers of events were more reliable predictors of reinforcer availability. In the ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 4, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The partial-reinforcement extinction effect does not result from reduced sensitivity to nonreinforcement.
Five experiments used a magazine approach paradigm with rats to investigate whether learning about nonreinforcement is impaired in the presence of a conditioned stimulus (CS) that had been partially reinforced (PRf). Experiment 1 trained rats with a PRf CS and a continuously reinforced (CRf) CS, then extinguished responding to both CSs presented together as a compound. Probe trials of each CS presented alone revealed that extinction was slower for the PRf CS than the CRf CS, despite being extinguished in compound. In Experiment 2, a CRf light was extinguished in compound with either a CRf CS or a PRf CS that had been match...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 4, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Explaining learned predictiveness: Roles of attention and integration of associative structures.
In 3 experiments, participants were trained in an associative learning paradigm in which they learned the relation between consumption of certain foodstuffs and the type of allergic reaction shown by a fictional patient. Experiment 1 demonstrated the learned predictiveness effect, showing that cues that had served as good predictors of outcomes in an initial phase of training were especially effective in a test given after a second phase of training in which learning about the same cues, but with different outcomes, had been required. Experiment 2 showed that this effect could be obtained when the two phases of training oc...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 4, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Pigeon category learning: Revisiting the Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961) tasks.
In a seminal study, Shepard, Hovland, and Jenkins (1961; henceforth SHJ) assessed potential mechanisms involved in categorization learning. To do so, they sequentially trained human participants with 6 different visual categorization tasks that varied in structural complexity. Humans’ exceptionally strong performance on 1 of these tasks (Type 2, organized around exclusive-or relations) could not be solely explained by structural complexity, and has since been considered the hallmark of rule-use in these tasks. In the present project, we concurrently trained pigeons on all 6 SHJ tasks. Our results revealed that the struct...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - March 14, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Learned predictiveness models predict opposite attention biases in the inverse base-rate effect.
Several attention-based models of associative learning are built upon the learned predictiveness principle, whereby learning is optimized by attending to the most predictive features and ignoring the least predictive features. Despite their functional similarity, these models differ in their formal mechanisms and thus may produce very different predictions in some circumstances. As we demonstrate, this is particularly evident in the inverse base-rate effect. Using simulations with a modified Mackintosh model and the EXIT model, we found that models based on the learned predictiveness principle can account for rare-outcome ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - March 14, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Delay of reinforcement versus rate of reinforcement in Pavlovian conditioning.
Conditioned stimulus (CS) duration is a determinant of conditioned responding, with increases in duration leading to reductions in response rates. The CS duration effect has been proposed to reflect sensitivity to the reinforcement rate across cumulative exposure to the CS, suggesting that the delay of reinforcement from the onset of the cue is not crucial. Here, we compared the effects of delay and rate of reinforcement on Pavlovian appetitive conditioning in mice. In Experiment 1, the influence of reinforcement delay on the timing of responding was removed by making the duration of cues variable across trials. Mice train...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - March 7, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Transfer of associability and relational structure in human associative learning.
A wealth of recent studies have demonstrated that predictive cues involved in a linearly solvable component discrimination gain associability in subsequent learning relative to nonpredictive cues. In contrast, contradictory findings have been reported about the fate of cues involved in learning biconditional discriminations in which the cues are relevant but none are individually predictive of a specific outcome. In 3 experiments we examined the transfer of learning from component and biconditional discriminations in a within-subjects design. The results show a greater benefit in associability for cues that had previously ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - February 28, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Uncertainty and blocking in human causal learning.
The blocking phenomenon is one of the most enduring issues in the study of learning. Numerous explanations have been proposed, which fall into two main categories. An associative analysis states that, following A+/AX+ training, Cue A prevents an associative link from forming between X and the outcome. In contrast, an inferential explanation is that A+/AX+ training does not permit an inference that X causes the outcome. More specifically, the trials on which X is presented (AX+) are often argued to be uninformative with respect to the causal status of X because the outcome would have resulted on AX trials whether X was caus...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 3, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Operant evaluative conditioning.
Two experiments investigated an evaluative transfer from actions producing pleasant and unpleasant outcomes to novel stimuli that were assigned to those actions in a subsequent stimulus–response task. Results showed that a fictitious social group was liked more when this group was assigned to the action previously associated with pleasant outcomes relative to the other action. This evaluative transfer from operant contingencies was observed although the actions did not generate outcomes during the stimulus–action pairing. It is concluded that operant contingencies can be used for preference construction because they sp...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - January 3, 2019 Category: Zoology Source Type: research