Changes in reward magnitude or value have been reported to produce effects on timing behavior, which have been attributed to changes in the speed of an internal pacemaker in some instances and to attentional factors in other cases. The present experiments therefore aimed to clarify the effects of reward magnitude on timing processes. In Experiment…

Evaluative learning is said to differ from Pavlovian associative learning in that it reflects stimulus contiguity, not contingency. Thus, evaluative learning should not be subject to stimulus competition, a proposal tested in the current experiments. Participants were presented in elemental and compound training phases with pictures of shapes as…

A first-person shooter video game was adapted for the study of causal decision making within dynamic environments. The video game included groups of three potential targets. Participants chose which of the three targets in each group was producing distal explosions. The actual source of the explosion effect varied in the delay between the firing…

In both healthy participants and various patient populations, performance on attentional set-shifting tasks has been found to be affected by learned irrelevance and/or perseveration. The present study examined whether or not these processes also play a role during the initial discrimination learning phase of those tasks. To this end, participants…

arrow]US associations also survived The memories of the unconditioned stimulus (US) and its absence (No US), symbolized as S[superscript R] and S[superscript N], respectively, may be retrieved on US or No US trials giving rise to four types of associations, S[superscript R][right arrow]US, S[superscript R][right arrow]No US, S[superscript N][right…

A long delay inserted between conditioning and test phases of a 3-stage Latent Inhibition (LI) procedure produces differential effects on LI depending on the delay context. Thus, enhanced LI has been obtained when the delay is spent in a context that is different from the remaining experimental contexts, but not when it is the same. The present…

We investigated whether search accuracy of adult humans could be enhanced using differential reward contingencies in landmark-based spatial tasks conducted on a computer screen. We found that search accuracy was significantly enhanced by differential outcomes in a conditional spatial search task, in which the landmark-to-goal relationship depended…

In two experiments, we investigated the relative impact of causal beliefs and empirical evidence on both decision making and causal judgments, and whether this relative impact could be altered by previous experience. 2. Selected groups of participants in both experiments received pre-training with either causal or neutral cues, or no pre-training…

The study examined the role of caffeine consumption in caffeine reinforcement. Previous findings have shown that caffeine reinforced flavor preference in moderate caffeine consumers who are caffeine deprived. However, most of these studies have employed rating procedures only, and have not shown the effectiveness of caffeine to reinforce behaviors…

In four experiments, we investigated the effect of giving rats exposure to a distinctive environmental context before a phase of training in which an injection of LiCl was paired with that context. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 were consistent with the possibility that such preexposure served to retard subsequent conditioning to the context…

Three computer based experiments, testing human participants in a non-immersive virtual watermaze task, used a blocking design to assess whether two sets of geometric cues would compete in a manner described by associative models of learning. In stage 1, participants were required to discriminate between visually distinct platforms. In stage 2,…

In many experiments, rats have evidenced extreme difficulty mastering alternation patterns. In three experiments, we explored rats' ability to learn double alternation patterns and possible reasons behind their past difficulties with such patterns. In Experiment 1, rats learned single and double alternation patterns. In the second and third…

In Experiments 1 and 2, rats were trained in a Morris pool to find a hidden platform located some distance away from a single landmark. Males learned to swim to the platform faster than females, but on test trials without the platform, males, unlike females, spent less time in the platform quadrant of the pool in the second half of each test trial…

We demonstrate here that initially neutral items can acquire "specific" value based on their associated outcomes, and that responses of physiological systems to such previously meaningless stimuli can rapidly reflect this associative history. Each participant participated in an associative learning task in which four neutral abstract pictures were…

Prior experience of unsignaled food can interfere with subsequent acquisition by birds of autoshaped key-pecking at a signal light. This has been understood to indicate that unsignaled food results in context conditioning, which blocks subsequent learning about the keylight-food relationship. In the present experiment with rats lever insertion as…