Chapter One
Associative Structures in Pavlovian
and Instrumental Conditioning
GEOFFREY HALL
INTRODUCTION
In the most basic of conditioning procedures,
the experimental subject (usually an animal,
but sometimes a human participant) experiences
two events in close temporal conjunction.
In Pavlovian conditioning, one stimulus
(the unconditioned stimulus, US) occurs
along with (usually shortly after) the presentation
of some other (the conditioned stimulus,
CS); in instrumental conditioning, a stimulus
(or outcome, O) is forthcoming after the
animal has emitted some specified pattern of
behavior (or response, R). That is, in both procedures,
the experimenter arranges an association
between events in the world. What could
be more natural then, than to attempt to explain
the resulting changes in the animal's behavior
in terms of a mechanism that allows the
animal to form some central representation of
the association between the events that it experiences?
Indeed, the dominant account of
conditioning over the last 100 years (since the
pioneering work of Pavlov and of Thorndike
at the turn of the 19th century) has been associative.
Specific accounts differ in m ... read full excerpt from Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology, Volume 3 ebook
