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.

Delaying extinction weakens the partial reinforcement extinction effect.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Vol 48(4), Oct 2022, 321-335; doi:10.1037/xan0000319Conditioned responding that has been extinguished can spontaneously return when the conditioned stimulus (CS) is first presented after an extended delay. This spontaneous recovery of responding suggests that the memory of nonreinforced experience with the CS is impaired over the delay period. Rescorla (2007) provided evidence that this effect of time on nonreinforcement is not specific to extinction. He showed that a delay period can also reverse the reduction of responding established by a partial reinfor...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 12, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The Rescorla-Wagner Model: The culmination of Hume’s theory of causation.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Vol 48(4), Oct 2022, 315-320; doi:10.1037/xan0000325The associative learning theory of Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner has been duly celebrated for its 50-year reign as the predominant model in learning science. One special recognition is warranted: its close correspondence with David Hume’s associative theory of causality judgment. Hume’s rules by which causes come to suggest effects are not only embraced by the Rescorla-Wagner model, but their mechanistic account makes precise quantitative predictions that can be assessed by empirical evidence rather...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 12, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Associative change in Pavlovian conditioning: A reappraisal.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Vol 48(4), Oct 2022, 281-294; doi:10.1037/xan0000318Robert A. Rescorla changed how Pavlovian conditioning was studied and interpreted. His empirical contributions were fundamental and theoretically driven. One involved testing a central tenet of the model that he developed with Allan R. Wagner. The Rescorla-Wagner learning rule uses a pooled error term to determine changes in a directional association between the representations of the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US). This learning rule predicts that 2 equally salient CSs (A and B)...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 12, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Delaying extinction weakens the partial reinforcement extinction effect.
Conditioned responding that has been extinguished can spontaneously return when the conditioned stimulus (CS) is first presented after an extended delay. This spontaneous recovery of responding suggests that the memory of nonreinforced experience with the CS is impaired over the delay period. Rescorla (2007) provided evidence that this effect of time on nonreinforcement is not specific to extinction. He showed that a delay period can also reverse the reduction of responding established by a partial reinforcement schedule. Here we describe a series of experiments that attempted to confirm Rescorla’s finding and additional...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 12, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

The Rescorla-Wagner Model: The culmination of Hume’s theory of causation.
The associative learning theory of Robert Rescorla and Allan Wagner has been duly celebrated for its 50-year reign as the predominant model in learning science. One special recognition is warranted: its close correspondence with David Hume’s associative theory of causality judgment. Hume’s rules by which causes come to suggest effects are not only embraced by the Rescorla-Wagner model, but their mechanistic account makes precise quantitative predictions that can be assessed by empirical evidence rather than by speculation and argumentation. Framed in this way, the Rescorla-Wagner model truly represents the scientific c...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 12, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Associative change in Pavlovian conditioning: A reappraisal.
Robert A. Rescorla changed how Pavlovian conditioning was studied and interpreted. His empirical contributions were fundamental and theoretically driven. One involved testing a central tenet of the model that he developed with Allan R. Wagner. The Rescorla-Wagner learning rule uses a pooled error term to determine changes in a directional association between the representations of the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US). This learning rule predicts that 2 equally salient CSs (A and B) will undergo equivalent associative change when they are conditioned in compound (i.e., AB→US). Rescorla’s results...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 12, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Pigeon’s choice depends primarily on the value of the signal for the outcome rather than its frequency or contrast.
Pigeons typically prefer a 20% probability of signaled reinforcement over a 50% probability of unsignaled reinforcement. There is even evidence that they prefer 50% signaled reinforcement over 100% reinforcement. It has been suggested that this effect results from contrast between the expected probability of reinforcement (e.g., 50%) at the time of choice and the value of the positive signal for reinforcement (100%). Alternatively, it is primarily the value of the positive signal for reinforcement itself that determines suboptimal choice. To attempt to distinguish between these two hypotheses, in Experiment 1, we gave pige...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion.
A Müller-Lyer figure consists only of a line and arrowheads located at both ends of the line. Many comparative studies have reported that animals perceive Müller-Lyer illusion as humans, but few have used appropriate experimental designs to verify whether animal subjects actually respond to line length alone. The present study investigated whether budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) can perceive the Müller-Lyer illusion by using a method that addresses this problem. Four budgerigars were trained to select a long or short line (counterbalanced across subjects) from two horizontal lines. Next, the same task was conducte...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Valence generalization across nonrecurring structures.
Semantically meaningless letter strings correlated with affective attributes (US) can become evaluatively conditioned stimuli (CS). Jurchiș et al. (2020) recently demonstrated CS-US correlations may influence evaluations toward previously unseen strings when the latter are grammatically congruent with CS. We replicated those authors’ findings in a modified extension (Experiment 1; N = 108), where emotional faces (US) were correlated with letter strings (CS) constructed from familiar (English) and unfamiliar (Phoenician) alphabets. CS-US trials were sandwiched by evaluations of strings that never appeared as CS but were ...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Inhibitory summation as a form of generalization.
Inhibitory learning after feature negative training (A+/AB–) is typically measured by combining the Feature B with a separately trained excitor (e.g., C) in a summation test. Reduced responding to C is taken as evidence that B has properties directly opposite to those of C. However, in human causal learning, transfer of B’s inhibitory properties to another excitor is modest and depends on individual differences in inferred causal structure. Here we ask whether instead of opposing processes, a summation test might instead be thought of in terms of generalization. Using an allergist task, we tested whether inhibitory tra...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Pavlovian summation: Data and theory.
In summation experiments, responding to a compound stimulus is assessed after conditioning a response to each of its components. This simple experiment poses significant challenges to models of associative learning because of substantial variability in results. Here, I introduce a new method to quantify generalization from components to compound in summation experiments, which I apply to over 250 measurements of summation in rabbits, pigeons, rats, and humans. The analysis confirms that more summation occurs with stimuli from different rather than from the same sensory modality, although this is not the sole determinant of...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - May 9, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research

Testing improves performance as well as assesses learning: A review of the testing effect with implications for models of learning.
Taking a test of previously studied material has been shown to improve long-term subsequent test performance in a large variety of well controlled experiments with both human and nonhuman subjects. This phenomenon is called the testing effect. The promise that this benefit has for the field of education has biased research efforts to focus on applied instances of the testing effect relative to efforts to provide detailed accounts of the effect. Moreover, the phenomenon and its theoretical implications have gone largely unacknowledged in the basic associative learning literature, which historically and currently focuses pri...
Source: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes - April 21, 2022 Category: Zoology Source Type: research