Preston Velasquez (ravensandra3)

We readily attribute the behavior of animals to contrast-like effects or reward prediction error, however, when similar behavior occurs in humans, we also should be prepared to explain it in terms of simpler learning mechanisms. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).The present study used simulations to examine whether Wagner's Standard Operating Procedures or Sometimes Opponent Processes (SOP) model explains various extinction phenomena. These included the so-called signature characteristics of extinction-renewal, reinstatement, and spontaneous recovery-as well as the effects on extinction of manipulations such as preexposure, the interval between extinction trials, the rate at which reinforcement ceases, and the presence of other stimuli. The simulations showed that SOP accounts for the effects of each of these manipulations. It does so for 2 reasons. First, the form of stimulus representation and rules for generating associative change mean that SOP can explain conditioning phenomena by appeal to changes in processing of both conditioned (CS) and unconditioned (US) stimuli, in contrast to other theories which confine changes in processing to either the CS (e.g., attentional theories) or the US (e.g., the Rescorla-Wagner model). Second, the processes that generate associative change in SOP are at least partially independent of those that generate performance. Hence, stimuli that differ in associative strength can extinguish at the same rate, and stimuli with equal associative strength can undergo different amounts of renewal, reinstatement or recovery. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).One of the most persisting assertions in Allan Wagner's view of conditioning is that the environment or context in which significant events occur can develop an association with these events, more or less in the same way as conditioned and unconditioned stimuli become associated with each other. He was drawn to this idea by evidence of contextual fear conditioning, contingency effects, some instances of context-specificity of long-term habituation, and latent inhibition. From a theoretical point of view, however, homologizing contexts to conditioned stimuli is not as simple as it seems, especially when quantitative theories are involved, as is the case of Wagner's work. It might be, for instance, that contexts cannot be represented merely as long-duration conditioned stimuli, in which case, no net contextual learning can occur due to the context being less correlated with reinforcement than with nonreinforcement. In this article, we use Wagner's sometimes-opponent-process model of conditioning to comment on the quantitative nature of this challenge. Also, based on an idea sketched by Mazur and Wagner, we describe a set of quantitative strategies that might be usefully considered to solve this dilemma within the general framework of Wagner's theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).This article briefly reviews 3 theories concerning elemental and configural approaches to stimulus representation in associative learning and presents a new context-dependent added-elements model (C-AEM). This model takes an elemental approach to stimulus representation where individual stimuli are represented by single units and stimulus compounds activate both those units and configurational units corresponding to each conjunction of 2 or more stimuli. Activity across these units is scaled such that each stimulus always contributes the same amount of activity to the system whether it is presented in isolation or in compound; the configurational units "borrow" activity from representational units for individual stimuli (and from each other). Pirtobrutinib BTK inhibitor This scaling is affected by the extent to which stimuli interact with each other perceptually. Hence, the model is conceptually similar to Wagner's (2003) replaced elements model but lacks features that explicitly code f