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In two instrumental conditioning experiments with rats, we examined the impacts of acquisition and extinction cues on ABC renewal of instrumental behavior. Animals were reinforced with food for lever pressing in one context, followed by extinction of the response in a second one. Presentations of a brief tone accompanied extinction in Experiment 1 (extinction cue), and acquisition in Experiment 2 (acquisition cue). A final test in a third context revealed that instrumental responding was decreased in the presence of the extinction cue, whereas it was increased in the presence of the acquisition cue. We discuss theoretical and clinical implications of our results.

One experiment with rats explored whether an extinction-cue prevents the recovery of extinguished lever-pressing responses. Initially, rats were trained to perform one instrumental response (R1) for food in Context A, and a different instrumental response (R2) in Context B. Then, responses were extinguished each in the alternate context (R1 in Context B; R2 in Context A). For one group, extinction of both responses was conducted in the presence of an extinction-cue, whereas in a second group, the extinction-cue only accompanied extinction of R1. During a final test, we observed that returning the rats to the initial acquisition context renewed performance and that response recovery was attenuated in the presence of the cue that accompanied extinction of the response. The impact of the extinction-cue, however, was not transferred to the response that has been extinguished without the cue. Our results are consistent with the idea that extinction established an inhibitory cue-response association.

Cue competition refers to phenomena indicating that learning about the relationship between a cue and an outcome is influenced by learning about the predictive significance of other cues that are concurrently present. In two autoshaping experiments with pigeons, we investigated the strength of competition among cues for predictive value. In each experiment, animals received an overexpectation training (A+, D+ followed by AD+). In addition, the training schedule of each experiment comprised two control conditions—one condition to evaluate the presence of overexpectation (B+ followed by BY+) and a second one to assess the strength of competition among cues (C+ followed by CZ−). Training trials were followed by a test with individual stimuli (A, B, C). Experiment 1 revealed no evidence for cue competition as responding during the test mirrored the individual cue–outcome contingencies. The test results from Experiment 2, which included an outcome additivity training, showed cue competition in form of an overexpectation effect as responding was weaker for Stimulus A than Stimulus B. However, the test results from Experiment 2 also revealed that responding to Stimulus A was stronger than to Stimulus C, which indicates that competition among cues was not as strong as predicted by some influential theories of associative learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In human predictive learning, blocking, A+ AB+, and a simple discrimination, UX+ VX–, result in a stronger response to the blocked, B, than the uninformative cue, X (where letters represent cues and + and – represent different outcomes). To assess whether these different treatments result in more attention being paid to blocked than uninformative cues, Stage 1 in each of three experiments generated two blocked cues, B and E, and two uninformative cues, X and Y. In Stage 2, participants received two simple discriminations: either BX+ EX– and BY+ EY–, or BX+ BY– and EX+ EY–. If more attention is paid to blocked than uninformative cues, then the first pair of discriminations will be solved more readily than the second pair. In contrast to this prediction, both discriminations were acquired at the same rate. These results are explained by the theory of Mackintosh, by virtue of the assumption that learning is governed by an individual rather than a common error term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]