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Wagner (Wagner, 1976), highlighting the impact that this theory has had in the research of invertebrate learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).This article reports the context specificity of habituation in earthworms (Lumbricidae family). Using earthworms as subjects-which are typically sensitive to odors-the present study sought to evaluate the context specificity of habituation by giving subjects repeated exposures to a bright light in one odorous context, after which they were presented again with the same stimulus in a different context. The recovery of responding in this second context was higher in the group where the odor of this context was different, in comparison with a control group for which the context was the same. To provide further support for these findings, a second experiment was run using a within-subject design where all subjects were trained in both of the conditions. In this case, in addition to the light, vibration was used as a second stimulus. The subjects again displayed a higher increase in responding in the condition where the context was different (in odor) in comparison with the case in which the context was the same, thus replicating the results obtained in the first experiment. We discuss the implications of these results in the light of current data and learning theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).Wagner's fully elaborated theory of learning (e.g., Vogel, Ponce, & Wagner, 2019) was founded on an initial analysis of the mechanisms responsible for habituation (Wagner, 1976, 1979). Central to its explanation of long-term habituation was the proposal that a predicted stimulus, one signaled by some other event as a consequence of associative learning, would be less effective at activating its central representation. We review evidence (from studies of the role of context in habituation and latent inhibition, of preexposure to the event to be used as an unconditioned stimulus in conditioning, and of conditioned diminution effects) taken to support this explanation. We argue that the evidence is less than convincing and consider instead an alternative account that interprets habituation as reflecting a reduction in the effective salience of a stimulus that is determined by a learning process akin to extinction, in which the critical factor is that the stimulus is presented followed by no consequences. The application of this account to the phenomena dealt with by Wagner's model is considered and further implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).We report 2 eye-tracking experiments with human variants of 2 rodent recognition memory tasks, relative recency and object-in-place. In Experiment 1 participants were sequentially exposed to 2 images, A then B, presented on a computer display. CHR2797 When subsequently tested with both images, participants biased looking toward the first-presented image A the relative recency effect. When contextual stimuli x and y, respectively, accompanied A and B in the exposure phase (xA, yB), the recency effect was greater when y was present at test, than when x was present. In Experiment 2 participants viewed 2 identical presentations of a 4-image array, ABCD, followed by a test with the same array, but in which one of the pairs of stimuli exchanged position (BACD or ABDC). Participants looked preferentially at the displaced stimulus pair the object-in-place effect. Three further conditions replicated Experiment 1's findings 2 pairs of images were presented one after the other (AB followed by CD); on a test with AB and CD, relative recency was again evident as preferential looking at AB. Moreover, this effect was greater when the positions of the first-presented A and B were exchanged between exposure and test (BACD), compared with when the positions of second-presented C and D were exchanged (ABDC). The results were interpreted within the theoretical framework of the Sometime Opponent Process model of associative learning (Wagner, 1981). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).When a cue is established as a reliable predictor of an outcome (A-O1), this cue will typically block learning between an additional cue and the same outcome if both cues are subsequently trained together (AB-O1). link2 Three experiments sought to explore whether this effect extends to outcomes and was investigated using the food allergist paradigm in human participants. In all 3 experiments, an outcome facilitation effect was observed. link3 That is, prior learning about an element of an outcome compound (A-O1) facilitated learning about a novel outcome when (A-O2) these outcomes were presented together (A-O1 O2) relative to a control stimulus that first received C-O3 trials prior to C-O1 O2 trials. In Experiment 2, however, participants were also presented with an additional set of control trials, which were presented during Stage II only and reliably predicted the outcome compounds. At test, participants displayed more learning about these additional control trials relative to the blocked outcomes, thus displaying an outcome blocking effect alongside an outcome facilitation effect. In Experiment 3, a one-trial outcome blocking procedure was used to distinguish theoretical accounts of these findings. This procedure revealed an outcome facilitation effect but not an outcome blocking effect. These results can be understood in terms of an account derived from Wagner's (1981) model. The implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).In 2 experiments, participants received a predictive learning task in which the presence of 1 or 2 food items signaled the onset or absence of stomachache in a hypothetical patient. Their task was to identify the cues that signaled the occurrence, or nonoccurrence of this ailment. The 2 groups in Experiment 1 and the single group in Experiment 2 received a blocking treatment, where Cue A and a combination of Cues A and X both signaled stomachache, A+ AX+. These groups also received a simple discrimination where the outcome was signaled by one compound but not another, BY+ CY-. Subsequent test trials revealed the so-called redundancy effect, where X was regarded as a more reliable predictor of the outcome than Y. This result occurred when the trials with A+ preceded those with AX+ (Group E, Experiment 1 and Experiment 2), and when the trials with A+ and AX+ were intermixed (Group C, Experiment 1). The results challenge theories based on the assumption that cues presented together must compete for a limited pool of associative strength. Rather, they are said to support theories that assume changes in attention determine what is learned when two or more cues are presented together. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).When humans make biased or suboptimal choices, they are often attributed to complex cognitive processes that are viewed as being uniquely human. Alternatively, several phenomena, such as suboptimal gambling behavior and cognitive dissonance (justification of effort) may be explained more simply as examples of the contrast between what is expected and what occurs as well as Wagner's Standard Operating Procedure model based on reward prediction error. For example, when pigeons are attracted to choices involving a suboptimal, low probability of a high payoff, as in unskilled gambling behavior, it may be attributed to reward prediction error or the contrast between the low probability of reward expected and the sometimes high probability of reward obtained (when one wins). Similarly, justification of effort, the tendency to attribute greater value to rewards that are difficult to obtain, is typically explained in terms of the tendency to inflate the value of a reward to justify the effort required to obtain it. When pigeons prefer outcomes that require more effort to obtain, however, it is more likely to be explained in terms of contrast between the effort and the reward that follows. We readily attribute the behavior of animals to contrast-like effects or reward prediction error, however, when similar behavior occurs in humans, we also should be prepared to explain it in terms of simpler learning mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).The present study used simulations to examine whether Wagner's Standard Operating Procedures or Sometimes Opponent Processes (SOP) model explains various extinction phenomena. These included the so-called signature characteristics of extinction-renewal, reinstatement, and spontaneous recovery-as well as the effects on extinction of manipulations such as preexposure, the interval between extinction trials, the rate at which reinforcement ceases, and the presence of other stimuli. The simulations showed that SOP accounts for the effects of each of these manipulations. It does so for 2 reasons. First, the form of stimulus representation and rules for generating associative change mean that SOP can explain conditioning phenomena by appeal to changes in processing of both conditioned (CS) and unconditioned (US) stimuli, in contrast to other theories which confine changes in processing to either the CS (e.g., attentional theories) or the US (e.g., the Rescorla-Wagner model). Second, the processes that generate associative change in SOP are at least partially independent of those that generate performance. Hence, stimuli that differ in associative strength can extinguish at the same rate, and stimuli with equal associative strength can undergo different amounts of renewal, reinstatement or recovery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).One of the most persisting assertions in Allan Wagner's view of conditioning is that the environment or context in which significant events occur can develop an association with these events, more or less in the same way as conditioned and unconditioned stimuli become associated with each other. He was drawn to this idea by evidence of contextual fear conditioning, contingency effects, some instances of context-specificity of long-term habituation, and latent inhibition. From a theoretical point of view, however, homologizing contexts to conditioned stimuli is not as simple as it seems, especially when quantitative theories are involved, as is the case of Wagner's work. It might be, for instance, that contexts cannot be represented merely as long-duration conditioned stimuli, in which case, no net contextual learning can occur due to the context being less correlated with reinforcement than with nonreinforcement. In this article, we use Wagner's sometimes-opponent-process model of conditioning to comment on the quantitative nature of this challenge. Also, based on an idea sketched by Mazur and Wagner, we describe a set of quantitative strategies that might be usefully considered to solve this dilemma within the general framework of Wagner's theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).This article briefly reviews 3 theories concerning elemental and configural approaches to stimulus representation in associative learning and presents a new context-dependent added-elements model (C-AEM). This model takes an elemental approach to stimulus representation where individual stimuli are represented by single units and stimulus compounds activate both those units and configurational units corresponding to each conjunction of 2 or more stimuli. Activity across these units is scaled such that each stimulus always contributes the same amount of activity to the system whether it is presented in isolation or in compound; the configurational units "borrow" activity from representational units for individual stimuli (and from each other). This scaling is affected by the extent to which stimuli interact with each other perceptually. Hence, the model is conceptually similar to Wagner's (2003) replaced elements model but lacks features that explicitly code for the absence of stimuli (i.e., inhibited elements).