Roles of context in acquisition of human instrumental learning: Implications for the understanding of the mechanisms underlying context-switch effects

Four experiments in human instrumental learning explored the associations involving the context that develop after three trials of training on simple discriminations. Experiments 1 and 4 found a deleterious effect of switching the learning context that cannot be explained by the context-outcome bina...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Gámez, Matías A., León, Samuel P., Rosas, Juan M.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Jaén
Repositorio:RUJA. Repositorio Institucional de la Producción Científica de la Universidad de Jaén
OAI Identifier:oai:ruja.ujaen.es:10953/1656
Acceso en línea:https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-016-0256-8
https://hdl.handle.net/10953/1656
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Contents of learning
Context-switch
Instrumental Conditioning
Humans
Descripción
Sumario:Four experiments in human instrumental learning explored the associations involving the context that develop after three trials of training on simple discriminations. Experiments 1 and 4 found a deleterious effect of switching the learning context that cannot be explained by the context-outcome binary associations commonly used to explain context-switch effects after short training in human predictive learning and in animal Pavlovian conditioning. Evidence for context-outcome (Experiment 2), context-discriminative stimulus (Experiment 3), and context-instrumental response (Experiment 4) binary associations was found within the same training paradigm, suggesting that contexts became associated with all the elements of the situation, regardless of whether those associations played a role in a specific context-switch effect detected on performance.