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…

One experiment with rats explored whether an extinction-cue prevents the recovery of extinguished lever-pressing responses. Initially, rats were trained to perform one instrumental response (R1) for food in Context A, and a different instrumental response (R2) in Context B. Then, responses were extinguished each in the alternate context (R1 in…

Emotional states influence how stimuli are interpreted. High anxiety states in humans lead to more negative, threatening interpretations of novel information, typically accompanied by activation of the amygdala. We developed a handling protocol that induces long-lasting high and low anxiety-like states in rats to explore the role of state anxiety…

The experimenter conducted three experiments to compare incidental language acquisition of familiar and non-familiar stimuli, and asses the effects of specific pairing experiences on the emergence of bidirectional naming (BiN) for familiar and non-familiar stimuli. In Experiment I the experimenter assessed the numbers of accurate untaught listener…

It has been suggested that, unlike pure extinction which typically results in the return of the fear response under a variety of circumstances, memory reactivation followed by extinction can attenuate the reemergence of conditioned fear. The reactivation-extinction procedure has attracted the attention of basic and clinical researchers due to its…

In two experiments, I tested for the presence of conditioned seeing as a measureable behavior, which was measured by participants' accuracy in drawing a stimulus, and how this behavior was related to the demonstration of the naming capability. In Experiment 1, participants demonstrated a correlation between drawing responses and speaker…

Context renewal is identified when the conditioned response (CR) elicited by an extinguished conditioned stimulus (CS) reappears as a result of changing the contextual cues during the test. Two experiments were designed for testing contextual renewal in a conditioned taste aversion preparation. Experiment 1 assessed ABA and AAB context renewal,…

A series of experiments on operant variability by Neuringer and colleagues (e.g., Neuringer, 1986, 2002; Page & Neuringer, 1985) have been repeatedly cited as showing that behavioral variability can be reinforced by making reinforcement contingent on it. They showed that the degree of variability in pigeons' eight-peck sequences, as measured by U…

The pioneering work by Kirk-Smith, Van Toller, and Dodd [Kirk-Smith, M. D., Van Toller, C., & Dodd, G. H. (1983). "Unconscious odour conditioning in human subjects." "Biological Psychology," 17, 221-231], established that an unnoticed odorant paired with an emotionally meaningful task can influence mood and attitudes when the odorant alone is…

To test the hypothesis that pigeons will only code the more salient sample when samples differ markedly in salience, pigeons were trained with samples consisting of a 2-s presentation of food (highly salient sample) and an 8-s presentation of keylight (less salient sample). During retention testing, pigeons tended to respond at longer delays as if…

Appetitive contextual excitation supported by intertrial unconditioned stimuli was more easily overcome by timed conditioned responding in rats using quiet (Experiment 1) rather than noisy (Experiment 2) food pellet deliveries. Head-entry responding in acquisition peaked above the contextual baseline when pellet delivery occurred 10, 30, 60, or 90…

There has been considerable interest lately in cases where instrumental conditionability appears to depend on the reinforcer used. Here the effects of Pavlovian conditioned stimuli (CSs)on golden hamster behaviors was observed. The intent was to see whether previously reported differences among the behaviors produced by food reinforcement and…

Explores role of ambiguity in producing verbal conditioning by using two E types and two S types. Six college students were assigned to "crafty Es. Results revealed that certain types of ambiguity increase verbal compliance. (Author)

The present article discusses how events outside a subject's skin and not accessible to another subject but to an experimenter may contribute to experimental analyses of private events. Of 16 undergraduates, 8, referred to as instructors, first learned conditional discriminations (i.e., B1C1, B2C2, B3C3, and B4C4) in a standard matching-to-sample…

Three experiments carried out second-order Pavlovian conditioning using either similar or dissimilar first-and second-order stimuli. All three experiments were designed to identify the effects of similarity upon conditioning as distinct from its effects upon sensitization or stimulus generalization. (Editor/RK)