Learning - Psychology 53.1
Dr. Delamater
Study Questions - Exam  #2

Basic concepts of Conditioning

8.  List 5 procedures used to produce inhibitory conditioning.  What are the three most common ways of measuring conditioned inhibition?
9.  What constitutes a good control group for assessing excitatory Pavlovian conditioning?  Also, what is wrong with the explicitly unpaired control procedure?  What might be a good control group for assessing inhibitory conditioning?

Conditions for learning
1.  How do the CS pre-exposure (sometimes called "latent inhibition") and US pre-exposure effects illustrate the importance of stimulus novelty for Pavlovian
conditioning?
2.  Describe the learned irrelevance experiment of Mackintosh (1973).
3.  What effects do CS intensity and US intensity have on the learning curve?
4.  What does "overshadowing" refer to?  & reciprocol overshadowing?
5.  Describe the interstimulus interval function, and the sorts of conditioning procedures used to generate it.  What does the function suggest about the
importance of temporal contiguity for learning to occur?
6.  What is the main conclusion to be drawn from Kaplan's experiment?  Also be able to describe his procedures and results.
7.  Describe the Rescorla and Cunningham (1979) study and indicate why it was important.
8.  Describe  Garcia and Koelling's experiment.  What are its important implications?
9.  According to the contingency view, when will excitatory learning occur?  inhibitory learning?  when will no learning take place?
10.  Describe Rescorla's experiment supportive of the contingency framework.  What implication does this experiment have for the importance of temporal
contiguity as a determiner of learning?
11.  Describe Kamin's blocking experiment (procedure, results, conclusion).  What implication does this experiment have for the importance of temporal
contiguity?  for contingency?
12.  How did Rescorla's (1971) experiment contrast the US surprise idea with the contingency idea?  What do we conclude from this experiment?
13.  Why was the experiment of Wagner, Logan, Haberlandt, and Price (1968) important?  What did it demonstrate?

Theoretical Models of Pavlovian Conditioning
1.  What are the basic concepts in the Rescorla-Wagner model?
2.  When does learning stop according to the Rescorla-Wagner model?
3.  According to the Rescorla-Wagner model, what are the effects of CS intensity and US intensity?
4.  In the Rescorla-Wagner model, what produces extinction?
5.  In the Rescorla-Wagner model, why does blocking occur?  why is learning reduced when the CS-US contingency is degraded? and what about the US preexposure effect?
6.  According to the Rescorla-Wagner model, what are the final associative strengths to each of the stimuli in the Pavlovian conditioned inhibition procedure?
7.  What is the overexpectation effect and how does it arise from the Rescorla-Wagner model?  Discuss the study by Lattal & Nakajima (1998).
8.  What does the Rescorla-Wagner model say should happen when you nonreinforce an inhibitor with a neutral stimulus?  Discuss the Rescorla (1971) study relevant to this.
9.  What phenomena does the Rescorla-Wagner model have difficulty explaining?
10.  Why does the model have difficulty explaining Latent Inhibition?  How can it be modified to explain it?
11.  What problem is posed by configural learning for the Rescorla-Wagner model?  What additional assumptions must be made for the model to explain the result?
12.  Explain how Garcia & Koelling's observation of CS-US relevance poses a problem to the Rescorla-Wagner model.
13.  What is learned irrelevance and why does it pose a problem for the Rescorla-Wagner model.