scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Journal ArticleDOI

Probability of shock in the presence and absence of CS in fear conditioning.

01 Aug 1968-Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology (J Comp Physiol Psychol)-Vol. 66, Iss: 1, pp 1-5
TL;DR: 2 experiments indicate that CS-US contingency is an important determinant of fear conditioning and that presentation of US in the absence of CS interferes with fear conditioning.
Abstract: 2 experiments indicate that CS-US contingency is an important determinant of fear conditioning and that presentation of US in the absence of CS interferes with fear conditioning. In Experiment 1, equal probability of a shock US in the presence and absence of a tone CS produced no CER suppression to CS; the same probability of US given only during CS produced substantial conditioning. In Experiment 2, which explored 4 different probabilities of US in the presence and absence of CS, amount of conditioning was higher the greater the probability of US during CS and was lower the greater the probability of US in the absence of CS; when the 2 probabilities were equal, no conditioning resulted. Two conceptions of Pavlovian conditioning have been distinguished by Rescorla (1967). The first, and more traditional, notion emphasizes the role of the number of pairings of CS and US in the formation of a CR. The second notion suggests that it is the contingency between CS and US which is important. The notion of contingency differs from that of pairing in that it includes not only what events are paired but also what events are not paired. As used here, contingency refers to the relative probability of occurrence of US in the presence of CS as contrasted with its probability in the absence of CS. The contingency notion suggests that, in fact, conditioning only occurs when these probabilities differ; when the probability of US is higher during CS than at other times, excitatory conditioning occurs; when the probability is lower, inhibitory conditioning results. Notice that the probability of a US can be the same in the absence and presence of CS and yet there can be a fair number of CS-US pairings. It is this that makes it possible to assess the relative importance of pairing and contingency in the development of a CR. Several experiments have pointed to the usefulness of the contingency notion. Rescorla (1966) reported a Pavlovian 1This research was supported by Grants MH13415-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health and GB-6493 from the National Science Foundation, as well as by funds from Yale University.

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This manuscript is part of a special issue to commemorate professor Paul Eelen, who passed away on August 21, 2016, and a selection of his manuscripts to English to allow wide access to his original insights and opinions.
Abstract: This manuscript is part of a special issue to commemorate professor Paul Eelen, who passed away on August 21, 2016. Paul was a clinically oriented scientist, for whom learning principles (Pavlovian or operant) were more than salivary responses and lever presses. His expertise in learning psychology and his enthusiasm to translate this knowledge to clinical practice inspired many inside and outside academia. Several of his original writings were in the Dutch language. Instead of editing a special issue with contributions of colleagues and friends, we decided to translate a selection of his manuscripts to English to allow wide access to his original insights and opinions. Even though the manuscripts were written more than two decades ago, their content is surprisingly contemporary. The present manuscript was originally published as part of a Liber Amicorum for Paul Eelen's own supervisor, prof. Joseph Nuttin. In this chapter, Paul Eelen presents a modern view on Pavlovian learning. It appeared in 1980, at the heyday of cognitive psychology which initially dismissed conditioning. Paul Eelen's perseverance in presenting learning principles as key to study human behaviour has proven correct and ahead of time. First published as: Eelen, P. (1980). Klassieke conditionering: Klassiek en toch modern. In Liber Amicorum, Prof. J. R. Nuttin, Gedrag, dynamische relatie en betekeniswereld (pp. 321-343). Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven.

5 citations


Cites background from "Probability of shock in the presenc..."

  • ...Rescorla (1968) was one of the first to study this issue systematically....

    [...]

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors presented an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discriminative approach embodied in psychological and computational models of learning, and formally described by communication theory.
Abstract: How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discriminative approach embodied in psychological and computational models of learning, and formally described by communication theory. It describes how discriminative learning theory offers an alternative perspective on the way that systems of semantic cues are conditioned onto communicative codes, while information theory provides a very different view of the nature of the codes themselves. It shows how the distributional properties of languages satisfy the communicative requirements described in information theory, enabling language learners to align their expectations despite the vastly different levels of experience among language users, and to master communication systems far more abstract than linguistic intuitions traditionally assume. Topics reviewed include morphological development, the acquisition of verb argument structures, and the functions of linguistic systems that have proven to be stumbling blocks for compositional theories: grammatical gender and personal names.

5 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper , a review highlights sex differences in context and cued fear conditioning, fear extinction and fear generalization with a focus on the neural circuits underlying these behaviors in rodents.

5 citations

Book ChapterDOI
23 May 2014

5 citations

31 May 2017
TL;DR: This article examined the productivity of a multiple-slot construction in the British National Corpus (XML edition): it be adj to v that, and showed that it is not likely to be a construction but rather a pattern of coining due to its limited type productivity.
Abstract: Non-redundant taxonomic construction-grammar models posit that only fully productive patterns such as let alone (Fillmore, Kay, & O’Connor, 1988), what’s X doing Y (Kay & Fillmore, 1999), or all-clefts (Kay, 2013) qualify as constructions because they license an infinity of expressions. Redundant models claim that, despite subregularities and exceptions, partially productive patterns also count as constructions, providing the overall meanings of such patterns are not the strict sums of their parts (Goldberg, 2006, 2009). Because determining what counts as a construction is a major bone of contention between redundant and non-redundant construction grammar taxinomies, I examine the productivity of a multiple-slot construction in the British National Corpus (XML edition): it be adj to v that. (1) It is important to note that 33% of the sound’s total land area will be protected. (BNC–CRC) (2) It is fair to say that it has the sweep and scope of an encyclical. (BNC–CRK) (3) Even so, it was hard to believe that his birthday in two days’ time would be only his twelfth. (BNC–FRF) There are 2136 tokens of the pattern in the corpus. If we concatenate the two lexical slots (A and Vinf), the type count is 578. There are 162 adjective types and 104 verb types. Presumably, according to Kay (2013), it be adj to v that is not likely to be a “construction” but rather a “pattern of coining” due to its limited type productivity. Contra Kay (2013), and following Author (2015), I demonstrate that even patterns that are not fully productive often have subregularities that are. Quantitative approaches have developed measures to capture the productivity of morphological processes in corpora. Such measures have been adapted to the study of multiple-slot constructions (Zeldes, 2012, Author, 2015). The most obvious measure is the type count V of the members of a category C in a corpus of N construction tokens. A major issue with indexing a measure on type is that it does not discriminate between established forms and new forms. Indeed, types are not distributed uniformly in a corpus, and the larger the corpus, the harder it is to find innovations. To keep track of vocabulary development across a given corpus, one can plot the number of types against the number of tokens at multiple intervals. One obtains a vocabulary growth curve (henceforth VGC) (Baayen, 1993). At first, the curve is expected to rise steeply as most tokens define a new type. Then, as more text is scanned, more and more tokens are included in already defined types, and the curve flattens out gradually. The VGC in Figure 1 shows that a construction can be productive (as indicated by the steep curves of A–Vinf concatenations) even though the productivity of its adjectival and verbal constituents is limited (as indicated by the flat curves of A and Vinf). VGCs rely on a set of measures described in Baayen (1989), Baayen and Lieber (1991), and Baayen (1993). These measures draw on the idea that the number of hapax legomena of a given grammatical category correlates with the number of neologisms in that category, which in turn correlates with the productivity of the rule at work. Thus, productivity is a factor of both a large number of low-frequency words and a low number of high- frequency words. This combination contributes to parsing effects which maintain the affix activated in the minds of speakers. Following Author (2015), I augment these hapax-based productivity measures with a combination of symmetric and asymmetric association measures involving χ2 and ∆P (Allan, 1980). Thanks to this combi- nation, I show that although the productivity of it be adj to v that is limited at its most schematic level, some partially filled subschemas such as it be hard/important/easy/difficult/possible/necessary/reasonable/impossible to v that and it be adj to think/say/suggest/know/assume/realize/see that are arguably productive.

5 citations


Cites methods from "Probability of shock in the presenc..."

  • ...Inspired by the rejection of classical conditioning to the benefit of associative learning (Rescorla 1968; Wagner & Rescorla 1972), Allan (1980) devised ∆P as a one-way-depency statistic to measure the asymmetric dependency between a cue and an outcome in behavioral experiments....

    [...]

References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This "truly random" control procedure leads to a new conception of Pavlovian conditioning postulating that the contingency between CS and US, rather than the pairing of CS andUS, is the important event in conditioning.
Abstract: The traditional control procedures for Pavlovian conditioning are examined and each is found wanting. Some procedures introduce nonassociative factors not present in the experimental procedure while others transform the excitatory, experimental CS-US contingency into an inhibitory contingency. An alternative control procedure is suggested in which there is no contingency whatsoever between CS and US. This \"truly random\" control procedure leads to a new conception of Pavlovian conditioning postulating that the contingency between CS and US, rather than the pairing of CS and US, is the important event in conditioning. The fruitfulness of this new conception of Pavlovian conditioning is illustrated by 2 experimental results.

1,328 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, three groups of dogs were trained with different kinds of Pavlovian fear conditioning for three different types of dogs: randomly and independently; for a second group, CSs predicted the occurrence of USs; and for a third group, S predicted the absence of the USs.
Abstract: Three groups of dogs were Sidman avoidance trained They then received different kinds of Pavlovian fear conditioning For one group CSs and USs occurred randomly and independently; for a second group, CSs predicted the occurrence of USs; for a third group, CSs predicted the absence of the USs The CSs were subsequently presented while S performed the avoidance response CSs which had predicted the occurrence or the absence of USs produced, respectively, increases and decreases in avoidance rate For the group with random CSs and USs in conditioning, the CS had no effect upon avoidance

160 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Rats in an experimental group were given 30 trials of differential CER and then the CS+ and CS− were combined during CER extinction, resulting in less suppression for the experimental group than shown by a control group, interpreted as a demonstration of the active inhibitory properties of CS−.
Abstract: Rats in an experimental group were given 30 trials of differential CER and then the CS+ and CS− were combined during CER extinction. The combination resulted in less suppression for the experimental group than shown by a control group which had a CS+ and a formerly random stimulus combined during extinction. This was interpreted as a demonstration of the active inhibitory properties of CS−.

44 citations


"Probability of shock in the presenc..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Although such an account is plausible for the present data, it fails to explain the active inhibition of fear found by Rescorla and LoLordo (1965), Rescorla (1966), and Hammond (1967)....

    [...]