Lecture 4 - Variables that Influence Effectiveness of Conditioning and Higher Order Conditioning

Question 1

What variables influence the effectiveness of conditioning?

Answer 1

Contiguity
Contingency effects
Salience effects
Surprisingness of the US/informativeness of the CS
CS-US relevance

Question 2

What is contiguity?

Answer 2

Close temporal or spatial occurrence

Question 3

What are contingency effects?

What are 2 of them?

Answer 3

Relatedness of the two events - when one occurs does the other occur

Latent inhibition
Partial reinforcement

Question 4

What is the effect of the novelty of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli?

Answer 4

If either the conditioned or the unconditioned stimulus is highly familiar, learning occurs more slowly than if the CS and US are novel

Question 5

Contingency effects
Novelty of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli

What is the latent-inhibition or CS-preexposure effect?

Answer 5

if a stimulus is highly familiar, it will not be as effective as a CS than if it were novel

Experiments on the latent-inhibition effect involve two phases. Participants are first given repeated presentations of the CS by itself. This is called the preexposure phase because it comes before the Pavlovian conditioning trials

After the preexposure phase, the CS is paired with a US using conventional classical conditioning procedures. The common result is that participants are slower to acquire responding because of the CS preexposure.

Question 6

What is the the US-preexposure effect?

Answer 6

Conditioning proceeded faster for the lever paired with the novel food than for the lever paired with the familiar food.

Question 7

CS and US Intensity and Salience

What is salience?

Answer 7

significance or noticeability

One can make a stimulus more salient or significant by making it more intense and, hence, more attention-getting.
- Biological needs
- Naturalistic appearance

Results in overshadowing

Question 8

Surprisingness of the US/Informativeness of the CS

What is blocking?

Answer 8

Blocking refers to a reduction in responding to a CS that was trained in the presence of an already established predictor of the US.

Question 9

What is CS–US Relevance, or Belongingness?

Answer 9

a genetic predisposition for the selective learning of certain combinations of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli.

Question 10

How can Learning Without an Unconditioned Stimulus occur?

Answer 10

Higher-Order Conditioning
Sensory Preconditioning

Question 11

What is Higher-Order Conditioning?

Answer 11

Conditioning a CR to the CS without the US

e.g., second-order or third-order conditioning

Question 12

What is the Higher-Order Conditioning procedure?

Answer 12

During the first phase, a cue (call it CS1) is paired with a US often enough to condition a strong response to CS1

Once CS1 elicited the conditioned response, pairing CS1 with a new stimulus CS2 (cues of the movie theater) was able to condition CS2 to also elicit the conditioned response.

The conditioning of CS2 occurred in the absence of the US.

Question 13

What is Sensory Preconditioning?

Answer 13

Associations can also be learned between two stimuli, each of which elicits only a mild orienting response before conditioning.

the procedure for sensory preconditioning is similar to the procedure for second-order conditioning, but the first two phases are presented in the opposite order

Question 14

What determines the nature of the conditioned response?

Answer 14

The US
The CS
The CS-US interval

Question 15

What is behavior systems theory?

Answer 15

It assumes that the presentation of a US in a Pavlovian conditioning procedure activates the behavior system relevant to that US

Question 16

How can S–R learning and S–S learning mechanisms be differentiated?

Answer 16

US devaluation

In Phase 1, the experimental and control groups receive conventional conditioning to establish an association between the CS and the US and to lead the participants to form a representation of the US. In Phase 2, the US representation is devalued for the experimental group but remains unchanged for the control group. If the CR is elicited by way of the US representation, devaluation of the US representation should reduce responding to the CS

Question 17

What is the blocking procedure?

Answer 17

During Phase 1, stimulus A is conditioned with the US in the experimental group, while the control group receives stimulus A presented unpaired with the US. During Phase 2, both experimental and control groups receive conditioning trials in which stimulus A is presented simultaneously with stimulus B and paired with the US. A later test of stimulus B alone shows less conditioned responding to stimulus B in the experimental group than in the control group.