| dc.description.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 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. | en_GB |
