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Todd, Travis P.

Psychology

2011

M.A.

Two experiments with rat subjects examined the effects of conditioned stimulus priming on the acquisition of conditioned responding. Experiment 1 demonstrated that presentation of a nonreinforced stimulus 60 s prior to the target stimulus was more detrimental to conditioning than if the nonreinforced stimulus was presented 240 s prior to the target stimulus. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the duration of the nonreinforced stimulus also affected acquisition. Conditioning was better for rats trained with a short (2 s) nonreinforced stimulus prior to the target stimulus as opposed to rats trained with a long (20 s) nonreinforced stimulus prior to the target stimulus. Overall, the results are not consistent with predictions made by computational models of learning (e.g., Gallistel & Gibbon, 2000), but are most consistent with associative models of learning which incorporate temporal dynamics of stimulus processing (e.g., Wagner, 1981).