Pavlovian instrumental interactions and associative control

Question 1

What is latent inhibition?

Answer 1

Difficulty learning about stimuli that are extremely familiar.

Question 2

What did Rescorla and Wagner have to say about latent stimuli?

Answer 2

Nothing

Question 3

What is an incidental pairing?

Answer 3

Associations that form other than intended pairings.

Question 4

What is magazine behaviour?

Answer 4

When animals perform an action in anticipation of a classically conditioned US.

Question 4

How to tell if an animal is classically or instrumentally conditioned? Give an example.

Answer 4

Holland (1979): A rat was put in a box. A light was presented for a time interval and then they got food. When the rats learned that, they began wandering over to the food magazine and waited for the food (magazine behaviour). If you pair the light with food except for when the rat makes that response, you can see whether this is a classical response or there is an instrumental component. Is he aware of the instrumental association between his action and the omission of the food?

If the magazine response is classical conditioning, they should continue it.
If it’s operant conditioning, they should stop.

Question 5

What is omission training and what does it investigate?

Answer 5

Omission training is when a reward (or US) is stopped in an experimental condition to investigate whether the behaviour is classically or instrumentally learned. If the animal stops performing the behaviour when the reward stops, we can tell that they have developed an association between the behaviour and the reward and are thus instrumentally conditioned. If they do not eliminate the behaviour entirely, they are classically conditioned.

Question 5

What’s the relationship between the CS and the CR?

Answer 5

The conditioned response is supposed to be constrained to what the unconditioned stimulus is. The CR has to be similar to the UR to some extent.

Question 6

Grindley (1932)

Answer 6

Guinea pigs were trained to get food if they turned left upon hearing a buzzer. The idea was that the CS is the buzzer and the US is the food, but it’s possible that the UR to the buzzer is turning left. If that’s classical conditioning, then the guinea pig won’t be able to learn to turn right to get food (because no connection between turning and food).
They were able to do it, which shows that this learning was instrumental. Association between their response and the reward. Hard to explain this in terms of buzzer-food association.

Question 7

What kind of responses elicit the most instrumental learning?

Answer 7

Certain responses will be performed by the animal regardless of experimenter intervention, so it’s easier to reward those. For instance, it’s easier to train rats for passive avoidance because they freeze up when presented with a shock anyway. They don’t have to do anything more than they already do.

Question 8

What factors influence the rate of instrumental response?

Answer 8

Since there is nothing to elicit the response as there is in classical conditioning, classically conditioned CSs can affect the level of instrumental performance.

Question 9

What is the two-process theory of Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer?

Answer 9

If responses are motivated by something nice and the CS predicts something nice, responses increase.
If responses are motivated by something nice and the CS predicts something nasty, then the responses decrease.
If responses are motivated by something nasty and the CS predicts something nasty, responses increase.
If responses are motivated by something nasty and the CS predicts something nice, responses decrease.

Question 10

Who proposed the two-process theory of Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer?

Answer 10

Rescorla & Solomon, 1967

Question 11

What is the crux of the two-process theory?

Answer 11

Boosting the relevant motivational state boosts responding, because you can’t feel happy and sad at the same time!

Question 12

Estes (1948)

Answer 12

Rats were trained with a tone signal for food.
Second stage of training: pressing a lever predicts food.
So both classical and instrumental conditioning. In the test, no food was delivered at all, and how much the rat pressed the lever was tested. They occasionally played the tone to see how the lever pressing was impacted. It was found that the tone temporarily increased the rate of response.

Question 13

Give an example of general pavlovian instrumental transfer

Answer 13

An example of General Pavlovian Instrumental transfer is when dogs were trained with two stimuli: one with shock and one with the absence of shock. The stimulus without the shock acted like a conditioned inhibitor. He superimposed the stimuli when the animals were doing an avoidance response. The conditioned inhibitor led to fewer responses than even the baseline.

Question 14

What is specific pavlovian instrumental transfer?

Answer 14

The effect of the nice stimuli can be stronger than the actual nice thing.

A Pavlovian CS signalling a reward energises instrumental responding for that specific reward (Estes, 1943).

Question 15

Explain the specific pavlovian instrumental transfer

Answer 15

A stimulus predicting one reward elevates the performance of response for the same reward (congruent responding) more than response for the other (incongruent responding).

Question 16

What is the clinical application of specific pavlovian instrumental transfer?

Answer 16

Important for addiction research. The reward of drinking or smoking, for instance, becomes associated with the sight of the alcohol or cigarettes. For example, seeing the tobacco is the CS, which makes going to the store to buy cigarettes the CR.

Question 17

Gorden & Baddeley (1975)

Answer 17

Made divers memorise words both on land and underwater, and they found that people were able to recall words better in the same context that they learned the words in.

Question 18

What are contextual cues?

Answer 18

The environment learning occurs in or discrete stimuli such as lights or tones

Question 19

How do contextual cues impact conditioning?

Answer 19

For example, the people involved in the creation of an association can be linked with the association itself. The presence of the people has a retrieval cue effect. These stimuli don’t work by means of classical conditioning.

Question 20

What is the discriminative control of instrumental associations?

Answer 20

Differs from a simple conditioned stimulus. If rats are presented with light-tone-food, and one group is exposed to tone-no food and the experimental group is exposed to light-no food, it is found that the latter group exhibits significantly more decreases in behaviour than the former group. The light could either be a retrieval cue or a CS (parsimonious explanation).

Question 21

What is the comparator hypothesis?

Answer 21

An extension proposing that the context or background stimuli also gain some associative strength, so a CS must have more strength than the context to elicit a conditioned response

Question 22

What is latent inhibition explained by the RW model?

Answer 22

Pre-exposure to a stimulus with no consequences results in it acquiring inhibitory associative strength (less surprising), so it conditions more slowly when later paired with a US.

Question 23

Holland 1979

Answer 23

Demonstrated different combinations of light (CS) paired with food (US)

2 things going on: CC = light paired with food. + IC = magazine response cancels CS. So, if the animal is aware of this relationship, they should stop. If not, they should persist.

Omission group showed fewer magazine responses after food stopped (suggesting IC)

Yoked group = higher MR’s compared with omission (yoked = proper control where light and tone paired but light also inhibits food)

Question 24

Species specific defense reactions

Answer 24

Innate involuntary actions can interfere with operant conditioning e.g. freezing makes active avoidance difficult

Question 25

Breland & breland 1961 raccoons

Answer 25

Raccoons trained to deposit coins in a bank slot. Learned to associate coins with reward => manipulated coins instead of depositing them

Question 26

Two process theory (Rescorla & Soloman 1967)

Answer 26

The interaction between excitatory and inhibitory processes in classical conditioning…. = how a conditioned stimulus (CS) can acquire both excitatory and inhibitory associations with an unconditioned stimulus (US), and how these associations can influence the conditioned response (CR).

Pavlovian CSs can affect levels of instrumental responding for positive reinforcers and vice versa. I.e. if responding is motivated by something nice and CS predicting something nice, respond more. E.g. a dog likes playing with a ball so owner picking up ball increases excitement. If responding is motivated by something nice and CS predicting something nasty, respond less. E.g. a child loves playing outside but the CS rain predicts they won’t be able to => decreased excitement. Because you can’t feel happy and sad at the same time…

Question 27

Pavlovian instrumental transfer

Answer 27

how a Pavlovian conditioned stimulus (CS) can influence instrumental (operant) behavior. In other words, PIT demonstrates how a stimulus that has been associated with a particular outcome through classical conditioning can affect an individual’s voluntary behavior in seeking or avoiding that outcome.

Question 28

Rescorla & Lolordo – dogs/instrumental transfer

Answer 28

Dogs trained to jump barrier based on Sidman avoidance schedule. A shock (CS+) and the absence of shock (CS-) affected rate of avoidance responding. An example of instrumental transfer i.e. learned associations from CC result in voluntary instrumental response.

Question 29

Specific Pavlovian Instrumental Transfer

Answer 29

Involves 2 rewards.

A stimulus predicting 1 reward elevates performance of responding for the same reward (congruent responding) more than responding for the other (incongruent responding).

So:
1. Pavlovian conditioning: A person associates the smell of freshly baked cookies (CS) with the enjoyment of eating cookies (reward 1).
2. Instrumental conditioning: The person learns that going to the bakery leads to obtaining cookies (reward 1), while going to the fruit stand leads to obtaining healthy snacks (reward 2).
3. Specific PIT: When the person smells freshly baked cookies (CS), they will be more likely to go to the bakery (congruent response) than to the fruit stand (incongruent response), even if they’re not hungry or planning to buy cookies at that moment.

This is relevant to addiction studies…

Question 30

Alarcon & Bonardi experiment 2020 – kids/instrumental transfer

Answer 30

Pictures of two kids. One gets food, the other drinks.
CC phase = training the association between cartoon girl 1 and food and cartoon girl 2 and drinks.

Instrumental phase = press z key for pictures of food, press m key for pictures of drinks

Specific PIT = when they saw pictures of the cartoons, they would usually input z or m according to the character.

Question 31

Contextual control/state dependence

Answer 31

Memories/associations can be cued by context or state e.g. Godden & Baddeley divers

Question 32

What is an occasion setter?

Answer 32

A controller retrieval cue. Works the same was as an Sd for CC. E.g. a tone predicts food but only if preceded by a light. Not just that the light is a CS blocking the tone, as when the light was presented without the tone => no response. I.e. if something does blocking, it means it’s a Pavolvian CS. If not, it’s a controller retrieval cue.

Question 33

Latent inhibition

Answer 33

We find it hard to form associations with really familiar stimuli. E.g. sheep and goats experiment … had prior exposure to light or rotor. Each group then found it harder to learn about light-shock and rotor-shock pairings, depending on which they were familiar with.

Like how you might blame food poisoning on an unfamiliar dish, rather than a familiar one.