Contextual control of pavlovian feature-positive and feature-negative discriminations

Blocking of occasion setting in feature-positive discriminations

Feature-positive and feature-negative learning in honey bees.

Honey bees (Apis mellifera anatolica) were subjected to sequential trials where they were given the choice between a feature-positive and a feature-negative feeding plate. The 'feature' being manipulated is the presence of a single blue circle among three circles marking the location of a small sucrose reward. That is, a 'feature-negative' target had three white circles, while a 'feature-positi...

Perirhinal cortex and feature-ambiguous discriminations.

Perirhinal cortex is often regarded as part of a medial temporal lobe (MTL) memory system, mediating memory selectively, and having little role in other functions such as perception (e.g., Squire and Zola-Morgan 1991; Buffalo et al. 1998, 1999; Squire et al. 2004). We and others have argued against this idea, suggesting instead that perirhinal cortex may have a role in perception (e.g., Buckley...

Occasion-setting training renders stimuli more similar: acquired equivalence between the targets of feature-positive discriminations.

In two experiments rats received training on two concurrent appetitive feature-positive discriminations. A preliminary test in Experiment 1 confirmed previous demonstrations of the transfer of occasion-setting properties--the feature from one of these discriminations was better able to facilitate responding to the occasion-set target CS from the second discrimination than to a control stimulus ...

Interference from multi-dimensional objects during feature and conjunction discriminations.

Feature discrimination performance within an attended object and interference from irrelevant, multi-dimensional objects (distractors) were examined in a two-choice, response compatibility paradigm. Results showed that the amount of interference by multi-dimensional distractors was dependent on three factors: (1) the discriminability of the incompatible, task-relevant distractor features; (2) t...