PS261 Chapter 4: Attentional Models and Timing:Info Models
Document Summary
You have an aversion to grandma"s bread pudding, on a holiday she serves it with special sauce. If you get sick you probably won"t develop an aversion to the sauce b/c you"ll blame the proven culprit (bread pudding) Calls into question the belief that temporal contiguity is sufficient for learning. The presence of the previously conditioned stimulus a blocks the acquisition of responding to the added cue b. The us has to be surprising to be effective in producing learning, if its signaled by a previously conditioned stimulus a, it will not activate the mental effort required for learning. Increased attention facilitates learning about a stimulus, and procedures that disrupt. Attentional models of conditioning: attention to a cs disrupt learning. Attentional theories differ in assumptions about what determines how much attention a cs commands. Some theories say the amount of attention an animal devotes to a cs is determined by how surprising the us was on the preceding trial.
