Mondragón, Esther and Gray, Jonathan and Alonso, Eduardo and Bonardi, Charlotte and Jennings, Dómhnall J. (2014) SSCC TD: a serial and simultaneous configural-cue compound stimuli

This paper presents a novel representational framework for the Temporal Difference (TD) model of learning, which allows the computation of configural stimuli – cumulative compounds of stimuli that generate perceptual emergents known as configural cues. This Simultaneous and Serial Configural-cue Compound Stimuli Temporal Difference model (SSCC TD) can model both simultaneous and serial stimulus compounds, as well as compounds including the experimental context. This modification significantly broadens the range of phenomena which the TD paradigm can explain, and allows it to predict phenomena which traditional TD solutions cannot, particularly effects that depend on compound stimuli functioning as a whole, such as pattern learning and serial structural discriminations, and context-related effects. Citation: Mondragón E, Gray J, Alonso E, Bonardi C, Jennings DJ (2014) SSCC TD: A Serial and Simultaneous Configural-Cue Compound Stimuli Representation for Temporal Difference Learning. PLoS ONE 9(7): e102469. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0102469 Editor: Gregg Roman, University of Houston, United States of America Received February 6, 2014; Accepted June 18, 2014; Published July 23, 2014 Copyright: 2014 Mondragón et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: Jonathan Gray’s contribution has been supported by an EPSRC Doctoral Training Centre grant (EP/G03690X/1). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * Email: [email protected]