Abstract
“Comparator” accounts of associative conditioning (e.g., Gibbon & Balsam, 1981; Miller & Matzel, 1988) suggest that performance to a Pavlovian CS is determined, by a comparison of the US expectancy of the CS with the US expectancy of general background cues. Recent research indicates that variation in the excitatory value of cues in the local temporal context of a CS may have a profound impact on conditioned responding to the CS (e.g., Kaplan & Hearst, 1982), implicating US expectancy based on local, rather than overall, background cues as the critical comparator term for a CS. In two experiments, an excitatory training context attenuated responding to a target CS. In Experiment 1, the context was made excitatory by interspersing unsignaled USs with target CS-US trials. In this case, posttraining extinction of the conditioning context restored responding to the target CS. In Experiment 2, the target CS’s local context was made excitatory by the placement of excitatory “cover” stimuli in the immediate temporal proximity of each target CS-US trial. In this experiment, posttraining extinction of the proximal cover stimuli, not extinction of the conditioning context alone, restored responding to the target CS. An observation from both experiments was that signaling the otherwise unsignaled USs did not appear to influence the associative value of the conditioning context. The results are discussed in relation to a local context version of the comparator hypothesis and serve to emphasize the importance of local context cues in the modulation of acquired behavior. Taken together with other recent reports (e.g., Cooper, Aronson, Balsam, & Gibbon, 1990; Schachtman & Reilly, 1987), the present observations encourage contemporary comparator theories to reevaluate which aspects of the conditioning situation comprise the CS’s comparator term.
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The data reported here formed part of a thesis submitted by the first author to the State University of New York at Binghamton in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master of arts degree. R.C.B. wishes to acknowledge the support and advice of his committee mem bers, Ralph Miller, Stanley Scobie, and Norman Spear, during all stages of this investigation. Support for this research was provided by National Institute of Mental Health Grant 33881 and the SUNY-Binghamton Center for Cognitive and Psycholinguistic Sciences. R.C.B. was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada postgraduate scholarship. Thanks are due to Hua Yin for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript and to Douglas Dufore and Gerard Newcomer for assistance in data collection.
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Barnet, R.C., Grahame, N.J. & Miller, R.R. Local context and the comparator hypothesis. Animal Learning & Behavior 21, 1–13 (1993). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197968
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197968