Effect of posttrial episodes on conditioning in compound conditioned stimuli

The effect of signaled and nonsignaled posttrial episodes (PTEs) on conditioning to the target CS of a preceding compound CS-US trial was examined in two conditioned emotional response (CER) experiments with rats. Experiment 1 revealed that a nonsignaled PTE, a second shock US, interfered with conditioning to the preceding target CS and that the interference effect of the PTE was greater when it occurred 5 sec as opposed to 1,800 sec after the preceding compound CS-US trial. Experiment 2 revealed that if the shock PTE was signaled by a CS, its ability to interfere with conditioning was reduced. This second study also revealed that omission of an "expected" US interfered with conditioning to the target CS. The implications of these data for information processing models of Pavlovian conditioning are discussed.