The extraction of cooccurrences between two events, A and B, is a central learning mechanism shared by all species capable of associative learning. Formally, the cooccurrence of events A and B appearing in a sequence is measured by the transitional probability (TP) between these events, and it corresponds to the probability of the second stimulus…

Sign-tracking is a form of autoshaping where animals develop conditioned responding directed toward stimuli predictive of an outcome even though the outcome is not contingent on the animal's behavior. Sign-tracking behaviors are thought to arise out of the attribution of incentive salience (i.e., motivational value) to reward-predictive cues. It…

Evidence that outcome associations, position associations, and response patterns each contribute to performance in animal serial learning came from two experiments in which three-trial series of rewarded and not-rewarded trials were examined. Response patterns were disrupted in Experiment 1 by placing animals directly in the goal on selected…

Nonhuman animals, like humans, appear sensitive to the structure of the elements of sequences, perhaps even when the structure relates nonadjacent elements. In the present study, we examined the contribution of chunking, rule learning, and item memory when rats learned serial patterns composed of two interleaved subpatterns. In one group, the…