Overview

The papers collected here focus on issues that are of relevance to learning in both humans and other animals, being particularly concerned with the nature of representation and how representations are developed and deployed. Allan Wagner has further developed a novel elemental model of associative learning. Suret and McLaren examine an elemental approach to transfer along a continuum and also indicate how the associability processes outlined by Mackintosh in 1975 could be incorporated into the McLaren and Mackintosh (2000) framework. Geoff Hall presents a series of experiments demonstrating that pre-exposure to compound stimuli sharing a common element enhances the salience or intensity of the unique elements and suggests that prior associative activation of a stimulus representation enhances the effectiveness of subsequent presentations of the stimulus. Dwyer argues that the learning processes engaged by associatively activated representations may not differ radically from those engaged by directly activated representations once it is recognised that the form of learning may well vary with the reinforcer type. The fact that the form of learning can vary with reinforcer type is clearly illustrated in the contribution of Forestell and LoLordo who assessed whether the conditioning of flavour preferences is accompanied by changes in taste reactivity as function of the nutritive property of the reinforcer. Le Pelley and McLaren are able to extend the learned irrelevance result documented in animal research to human learning. One of the enduring issues in learned irrelevance research is the question of the appropriate control conditions for assessing the retardation of learning, and in the present issue both Bonardi and Ong and Baker et al. re-examine this question by presenting evidence that the standard control conditions may well themselves bring about complex forms of learning. Chamizo suggests that many of the standard phenomena (blocking, overshadowing) seen in Pavlovian conditioning preparations are also demonstrable in the radial and water mazes. While agreeing that selective learning occurs for intra- and extra-maze cues, Pearce argues that learning about the geometric properties of an enclosed space are immune to overshadowing. Dickinson and de Wit analyse the problem of articulating an associative structure to represent such knowledge.

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9781841699370

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Anthony Dickinson, Ian P.L. McLaren

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