Latent inhibition in human adults without masking

Latent inhibition refers to attenuated responding to Cue X observed when the X-outcome pairings are preceded by X-alone presentations. It has proven difficult to obtain in human adults unless the preexposure (X-alone) presentations are embedded within a masking (i.e., distracting) task. The authors hypothesized that the difficulty in obtaining latent inhibition with unmasked tasks is related to the usual training procedures, in which the preexposure and conditioning experiences are separated by a set of instructions. Experiment 1 reports latent inhibition without masking in a task in which preexposure and conditioning occur without interruption. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrate that this attenuation in responding to target Cue X does not pass a summation test for conditioned inhibition and is context specific, thereby confirming that it is latent inhibition. Experiments 3 and 4 confirm that introducing instructions between preexposure and conditioning disrupts latent inhibition.