| Abstract: | In four experiments we investigated whether signaled and unsignaled unconditional stimuli (US) presentations resulted in differential context conditioning. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the presence of a tone during grain presentation facilitated the formation of tone–food associations in pigeons. Experiment 2 also showed that the acquisition of associative value by the tone did not diminish associations between context and the US. Experiment 3 showed that signaled USs did not interfere with the acquisition of context–US associations, and Experiment 4 showed that even when the signal was extensively pretrained, context–US associations could not be blocked. The results of these experiments are inconsistent with conditioning models that require competition between cues and contexts for associative value. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
