• Pigeon experiments > the pigeon pecking at the light that it has been conditioned to learn a relationship between it and food/water.
• The pigeon pecks at the light in the same way it would open its beak to eat/drink water.
• The pigeon can’t not peck at the light.

sign-tracking vs goal-tracking in rats

• Individual differences in sign vs goal tracking are related to how readily rats acquire drug-related habits > sign-trackers are more likely to become addicted than goal-trackers.
• Sign-tracking is held to reflect the processes involved in drug addiction where drug-related cues acquire so-called incentive salience (power to incentivise behaviours when they ought not to).
• Relative to goal-trackers, sign-trackers are more likely to imbue the lever and drug-related cues with such salience.
• Sign-trackers will interact with what signals the reward > if a lever appearing in a box signals food, the sign-trackers will interact with the lever when it appears(pressing, sitting, biting, etc), but goal-trackers will go to where the food will be.
  

problem solving

• Pavlovian conditioning has evolved to help us solve the problems of our experience and to prepare us for the world in which we live.
• Food selection: omnivores (people) can eat almost anything. So how do we take what is actually edible and reject the rest?
• Human infants are born with a liking for sweet tastes and a dislike of bitter ones but have no innate preference for smells > how do we come to like some flavours (taste-smell experiences) or reject others?
• People come to like the flavours associated with the effects produced by drugs, such as the flavour of cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and coffee.
• In each case, the flavour starts from a neutral or even a negative hedonic value but acquires a positive hedonic value because it signals the effects produced by nicotine, alcohol or the coffee.

preparation

• increases reproductive fitness
  
  • japanese quail study psyc1029
• promotes defence
  
  • Learning to identify cues that signal danger is an adaptation that emerged early in the evolution of animal life.
  • This learning allows people and animals to anticipate the danger and, thereby, respond appropriately: sympathetic nervous system arousal, decreased pain sensitivity, protective reflexes, “fight or flight”, and freezing.
  • Pavlovian conditioned responses are shaped by biology.

temporal contiguity

• Association by temporal contiguity is one of the oldest ideas in the study of learning.
  
  • Two events are more likely to be associated when they occur together than when their presentations are separated in time.
• This likely reflects the nature of the physical world:
  
  • Events that occur together are more likely to be related to each other than events that occur separately.
• However, temporal contiguity isn’t NECESSARY for learning; we learn about relations between events that are separated by considerable delays and, on occasion, we learn about relations between events that have simply never occurred together.
• Temporal contiguity isn’t SUFFICIENT for learning; the blocking effect.
  
  • Prior learning can block learning about different contiguous events > learning about the CS fails when it is accompanied by a better predictor of the us.
    

contingency

• there needs to be information between the contiguous events in order to learn.
• Animals and people are sensitive to the contingency between two events, and to the contingency between an action and an outcome.
• Learning mechanisms are designed to detect:
  
  • Predictive relations between events (pavlovian)
  • Causal relations between actions and events (instrumental)
• An otherwise effective CS-US relation can be rendered ineffective when the CS is accompanied by a better predictor of the US.
  

• Extinction occurs when an already-conditioned stimulus is presented in the absence of the US
• Responding to the CS declines across the CS alone presentations; eventually, it ceases altogether, at which point the CS is said to be extinguished.
• The Rescorla-Wagner model explains extinction as the gradual weakening and eventually erasure of the CS-US association.