Associative models of discrimination and generalisation: an evaluation in Pavlovian conditoning and causal judgement paradigms

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Learning is fundamental to humans from basic survival to everyday live. This ubiquity is matched in nature where animals in all parts of the evolutionary scale demonstrate learning. Successful scientific study of learning involves identification of the target behaviour and development of suitable study procedures. Our project is concerned with how people learn to predict events and uses convergent operations to measure performance. Based upon Pavlov's seminal contribution to use salivary reflexes to measure learning, associative theory has now been extended way beyond the study of reflexes in animals, showing that very different aspects of human behaviour can be addressed by associative models. One of the key problems in associative theory is to specify how multiple stimuli are perceived and processed. For example, Pavlov's bell occurred in a context containing numerous background sounds and visual stimuli. Furthermore, responses to any stimulus depend on the context. Responding differently to the same stimulus in different compounds (or contexts) is fundamental to the solution of many problems. Our proposal aims to test the predictions of competing associative models for the representation of stimulus compounds in Pavlovian eyeblink conditioning and causal judgement paradigms. These superficially very different procedures, one based on simple reflexes the other on "higher-order" cognitive processes, share many attributes. By using these different paradigms we will test the generality of our conclusions.