2016-12-10
It is widely held that the extinction of a conditioned response is more context specific than its initial acquisition. One proposed explanation is that context serves to disambiguate the meaning of a stimulus. Using a procedure that equated the learning histories of the contexts, Biopsychologists from Cold Spring Harbor, Mainz, Marburg, and Bochum showed in pigeons that the memory of an appetitive Pavlovian association can be highly context specific despite being unambiguous. This result is inconsistent with predictions of the Rescorla–Wagner model of learning but in line with configural accounts of contextual control of behavior. The authors propose an explanatory model in which context serves to modulate the gain of associative strength and which expands upon the configural idea of unitary representations of context and conditioned stimuli.
It is widely held that the extinction of a conditioned response is more context specific than its initial acquisition. One proposed explanation is that context serves to disambiguate the meaning of a stimulus. Using a procedure that equated the learning histories of the contexts, Biopsychologists from Cold Spring Harbor, Mainz, Marburg, and Bochum showed in pigeons that the memory of an appetitive Pavlovian association can be highly context specific despite being unambiguous. This result is inconsistent with predictions of the Rescorla–Wagner model of learning but in line with configural accounts of contextual control of behavior. The authors propose an explanatory model in which context serves to modulate the gain of associative strength and which expands upon the configural idea of unitary representations of context and conditioned stimuli.
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