Association and Inhibition
McLaren, Ian P.L.; Verbruggen, Frederick
Date: 1 December 2015
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
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Abstract
What is inhibition? The “problem of inhibition” is one that has puzzled learning theorists for many decades. Once it had been demonstrated that pairing a CS ( s uch as a tone or a light) with a US (such as food or shock) produced excitatory conditioning (Pavlov 1927 , and see Chapter 2 of Mackintosh 1974), it was natural to ...
What is inhibition? The “problem of inhibition” is one that has puzzled learning theorists for many decades. Once it had been demonstrated that pairing a CS ( s uch as a tone or a light) with a US (such as food or shock) produced excitatory conditioning (Pavlov 1927 , and see Chapter 2 of Mackintosh 1974), it was natural to consider if a signal could “undo” the effect of an excitatory CS. We now call such a signal a Conditioned Inhibitor . A viable recipe for producing conditioned in hibition is to use a design such as A+ AB - , which simply denotes trials where A and the US are paired , interspersed with trials where A and B occur in compound but without the US. The result is that B acquires the properties of being hard to condition to that US (i.e. , it passes the retardation test for a conditioned inhibitor), and of suppressing excitatory responding when presented in compound with A or with another excitatory CS that has been conditioned with the same US (i.e. , it passes the summation te st for conditioned inhibition). In this chapter, we will ask what it is about B that enables it to pass these tests, and what it is about the A+ AB - design that confers these properties. But first we must consider another use of the term “inhibition”, one that is just as prevalent amongst cognitive psychologists, but gives a somewhat different meaning to the concept.
Psychology - old structure
Collections of Former Colleges
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