4.1 The Conditions of Conditioning

Question 1

What is temporal contiguity?

Answer 1

Two stimuli closely related in time; they co-occur together

Question 2

What was previously thought about TC?

Answer 2

If the US and CS occurred close together in time = good effective learning

Question 3

What is the general rule for TC?

Answer 3

Amount and speed of conditioning decreases as temporal separation of CS and US increases

Question 4

Give an example of the effect of TC on conditioned suppression

Answer 4

When shock occurs 10s after noise, the learning of association is strong - show high freezing behaviour

When shock occurs 90s after noise, the learning of association is much weaker - show low freezing behaviour

Question 5

What happens to learning when you present the CS and US v close in time together?

Answer 5

Learning is not very good

Question 6

Why is small TC not always effective in learning? Give an example in your explanation.

Answer 6

The brain is trying to discount what is implausible
eg. flavour aversion - think about it biologically

• Learning that a flavour makes you sick - takes time for the digestive process to take place
• Something you ate a few mins ago isn’t what is making you sick, more likely to be something you ate hours ago
• The brain is factoring in the biological properties of what is going on

Question 7

What is the spacing of trials and is it effective for learning?

Answer 7

The space between the US’s and it affects learning

Question 8

Is TC the only factor important for learning?

Answer 8

No - trial spacing has a separate effect

Question 9

What do we use to measure whether learning is effective due to the diff factors involved?

Answer 9

Interval between US’s : CS duration

Question 10

What ratio shows best learning and how do we attain it?

Answer 10

A large ratio signals the best learning

We get a large ration when the interval between US’s is big and small CS duration

Question 11

Who came up with the unconfounding control experiment to test whether TC is sufficient enough for learning?

Answer 11

Rescorla

Question 12

Discuss the confounding control experiment looking at sufficiency of TC

Answer 12

Researchers would compare 2 conditions: paired or unpaired
Paired is experimental condition, unpaired = control

Unpaired condition: Tone present = no shock
- Shock occurred when the tone was absent

There is something that confounds the control condition -confounds the correlations of the CS and US in time

There is a strong +ve correlation in time in paired condition
In unpaired condition, there is a strong -ve condition

Question 13

What did Rescorla do to the experiment to make it unconfounding?

Answer 13

Made it so the US occurred randomly - here there is no +ve or -ve correlation, it just equals 0

The CS would sometimes come on when the US was on

Under these conditions, there is still contiguity:

• There are still instances where the US follows the CS
• US = shock, CS = tone
• The randomness does break the correlation and resulted in no conditioning

Question 14

What did Rescorla’s truly random experiment show?

Answer 14

Although there is perfect TC between the CS and US it was not enough to produce conditioning when the contingency is 0

Question 15

What are the 2 demonstrations that show TC isn’t sufficient enough for learning to take place?

Answer 15

Overshadowing

Blocking

Question 16

Discuss overshadowing experiment.

Answer 16

Rats learn that whenever the signal comes on they receive a sucrose pellet
- The more they poke their nose in, the more they have learnt about something

If you condition the CS’s alone, the rat learns well that both tone 1 and green light predicts sucrose pellet

What happens when 2 CS’s conditioned together (bottom group) to result in sucrose pellet but at test only present 1 CS?
The responding is lower for both CS’s when presented alone
Call this overshadowing - presenting the CS’s together in training detracts from learning about them individually

Question 17

What is saliency?

Answer 17

Refers to how noticeable a stimulus is

Intrinsically related to the property of the CS but not quite right in all cases

Question 18

Discuss the saliency and overshadowing experiment

Answer 18

Group 1 = light predicting shock
Group 2 = light and noise predicting shock
Group 3 = light and more salient noise predicting shock

Light is the same in all conditions - what happens when present the light alone at test?

The results show if the light is presented in isolation with the shock, you learn a lot = There is a small supp ratio

With a soft noise (group 2) still learn a lot about the light as there is a small supp ratio = The soft noise does not overshadow the light

The loud noise (group 3) overshadows the light a lot and has reduced the amount of learning = There is a high supp ratio

Question 19

What is a suppression ratio?

Answer 19

Quantifies the amount of learning taking place

0 suppression ratio = a lot of learning

Max suppression ratio = 0.5 (i.e. no learning has taken place)

Question 20

What did Kamin show in 1968?

Answer 20

Conditioning to a CS could be “blocked” by the presence of a 2nd CS that already signalled the US

Question 21

What were the control conditions in the blocking experiment?

Answer 21

Overshadowing conditions = control conditions

• Only things happen in conditioning phase, no pre-condition
• Testing asymmetries in the stimuli that are being presented and together they are the control

Group 1: TL+shock, test L
Group 2: TL + shock, test T

Question 22

What were the critical groups of interest in the blocking experiment?

Answer 22

The blocked groups = critical group of interest

Get the exact same pairings in the conditioning phase as the overshadowed group

Critical thing is the preconditioning phase in the blocked condition

He paired one of the stimuli with the shocks
Group 1 = noise shock pairing before light is introduced
Group 2 = light shock pairing before noise is presented

Question 23

What did the blocking experiment results show?

Answer 23

Overshadowed groups on average show good suppression

The learning to the light is v bad in Group 1 blocked
The learning to the noise is v bad in Group 2 blocked

Question 24

Why do the blocking experiment results occur?

Answer 24

This happens because you already know which CS predicts the shock due to the pre-conditioning phase