Over sixty years ago, B. F. Skinner proposed that a discriminative stimulus in an operant conditioning paradigm does not elicit a response but simply "sets the occasion" for the response to occur. More recently, investigators have claimed that, whereas in many Pavlovian conditioning paradigms a conditioned stimulus (CS) elicits a conditioned response (CR) because it signals the occurrence of an unconditioned stimulus, in other paradigms a CS elicits a CR because it sets the occasion for the responding produced by another CS.
The eminent group of experimental psychologists and theoreticians who authored the chapters of this book discuss the current status of data and theories concerning simple classical conditioning and occasion setting. Part 1 compares the properties of simple stimuli and occasion setters; Part 2 analyzes the different paradigms in which the concept of occasion setting can be applied; and Part 3 introduces four formal models of classical conditioning that address occasion setting.
Contributors
Introduction
I. Properties of Occasion Setters
- Analogies Between Occasion Setting and Pavlovian Conditioning
—Ralph R. Miller and Philippe Oberling - Conditional Learning: An Associative Analysis
—Charlotte Bonardi - Mechanisms of Feature-Positive and Feature-Negative Discrimination Learning in an Appetitive Conditioning Paradigm
—Mark E. Bouton and James B. Nelson - What Can Nontraditional Features Tell Us About Conditioning and Occasion Setting?
—Darlene M. Skinner, Murray J. Goddard, and Peter C. Holland
II. Conditional Discriminations
- Pavlovian Feature-Ambiguous Discrimination
—Sadahiko Nakajima - Perspectives on Modulation: Modulator- and Target-Focused Views
—Dale Swartzentruber - Contextual Control as Occasion Setting
—Geoffrey Hall and Esther Mondragón - Hunger Cues as Modulatory Stimuli
—T. L. Davidson - The Role of Attention in the Solution of Conditional Discriminations
—John M. Pearce, David N. George, and Edward S. Redhead
III. Formal Models
- Conditioned Stimuli Are Occasion Setters
—John W. Moore and June-Seek Choi - A Temporally Sensitive Recurrent Network Model of Occasion Setting
—James Zackheim, Catherine Myers, and Mark Gluck - Occasion Setting: Influences on Conditioned Emotional Responses and Configural Cues
—Susan E. Brandon and Allan R. Wagner - A Real-Time Theory of Pavlovian Conditioning: Simple Stimuli and Occasion Setters
—Jeffrey A. Lamoureux, Catalin V. Buhusi, and Nestor A. Schmajuk
Author Index
Subject Index
About the Editors
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