Learned changes in the sensitivity of stimulus representations: Associative and nonassociative mechanisms

Central to associative learning theory is the proposal that the concurrent activation of a pair of event representations will establish or strengthen a link between them. Associative theorists have devoted much energy to establishing what representations are involved in any given learning paradigm and the rules that determine the degree to which the link is strengthened. They have paid less attention to the question of what determines that a representation will be activated, assuming, for the case of classical conditioning, that presentation of an appropriately intense stimulus from an appropriate modality will be enough. But this assumption is unjustified. Ipresent the results of experiments on the effects of stimulus exposure in rats that suggest that mere exposure to a stimulus can influence its perceptual effectiveness—that the ability of a stimulus to activate its representation can be changed by experience. This conclusion is of interest for two reasons. First, it supplies a direct explanation for the phenomenon of perceptual learning—the enhancement of stimulus discriminability produced by some forms of stimulus exposure. Second, it poses a theoretical challenge in that it seems to require the existence of a learning mechanism outside the scope of those envisaged by current formal theories of associative learning. I offer some speculations as to how this mechanism might be incorporated into such theories.     

Representation-mediated Inhibitory Learning in the Conditioned-suppression Procedure

In three experiments, rats in group I (for intermixed) were given non-reinforced exposure to two compound stimuli, AX and BX, where A and B represent different auditory cues, and X represents a visual cue. AX and BX were presented in alternation. Group B (blocked) received similar exposure except that subjects experienced a block of AX trials and then a block of BX trials. Subsequent shock reinforcement of A was found to endow B with inhibitory strength in group I, as assessed by retardation (Experiments 1 and 2) and summation tests (Experiment 3). This outcome confirms and extends the results reported by Espinet, Iraola, Bennett, and Mackintosh (1995) and constitutes a further example of mediated learning in which the associative strength of a stimulus is found to be modified as a consequence of training given to some other event with which that stimulus is associated.