This paper reviews extant research in classical conditioning effects in consumer behavior and advertising contexts to determine whether they are real or illusory. The empirical results reveal that in cases where classical conditioning effects were found, they could be countermined by the deficiencies in research methodologies, demand artifacts, the mediating role of contingency awareness, or so...

In a semi-intact preparation of Aplysia californica Cooper, classical conditioning training leads to changes in the synaptic strength at the sensory-motor neurone synapse. However, these changes are neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about the observed behavioural changes of the gill withdrawal reflex. We therefore tested whether the ability of a gill motor neurone to elicit a gill withd...

The cellular bases of learning are currently under active investigation by both experimental and theoretical means. In this paper, a simple neuronal wiring diagram is proposed that can reproduce both simple and higher-order behavioral paradigms seen in invertebrate classical conditioning experiments. Learning in this model does not take place by modification of synaptic strength values. Instead...

Temporal difference learning has been proposed as a model for Pavlovian conditioning, in which an animal learns to predict delivery of reward following presentation of a conditioned stimulus (CS). A key component of this model is a prediction error signal, which, before learning, responds at the time of presentation of reward but, after learning, shifts its response to the time of onset of the ...

Classical methods for fitting a varying intercept logistic regression model to stratified data are based on the conditional likelihood principle to eliminate the stratum-specific nuisance parameters. When the outcome variable has multiple ordered categories, a natural choice for the outcome model is a stratified proportional odds or cumulative logit model. However, classical conditioning techni...

Eye-blink conditioning involves the pairing of a conditioned stimulus (usually a tone) to an unconditioned stimulus (air puff), and it is well established that an intact cerebellum and interpositus nucleus, in particular, are required for this form of classical conditioning. Changes in synaptic number or structure have long been proposed as a mechanism that may underlie learning and memory, but...

Encoding of behavioral episodes as spike sequences during hippocampal theta oscillations provides a neural substrate for computations on events extended across time and space. However, the mechanisms underlying the numerous and diverse experimentally observed properties of theta sequences remain poorly understood. Here we account for theta sequences using a novel model constrained by the septo-...

The role of contingency awareness in classical conditioning experiments using human subjects is currently under debate. This study took a novel approach to manipulating contingency awareness in a differential Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. Complex sine wave gratings were used as visual conditional stimuli (CS). By manipulating the fundamental spatial frequency of the displays, we were able to...

Models of associative learning have proposed that cue-outcome learning critically depends on the degree of prediction error encountered during training. Two experiments examined the role of error-driven extinction learning in a human causal learning task. Target cues underwent extinction in the presence of additional cues, which differed in the degree to which they predicted the outcome, thereb...

In Experiments 1 and 2 rats received uncorrelated presentations of a light conditioned stimulus (CS) and a food unconditioned stimulus (US) on each day of a preexposure phase. Control subjects received the same number of USs during the first half of preexposure and the same number of CSs during the second. Uncorrelated preexposure retarded inhibitory conditioning. Experiment 3 showed, however, ...