Changes in attention to an irrelevant cue that accompanies a negative patterning [corrected] discrimination.

Pigeons were trained in two experiments with negative patterning discriminations that were accompanied by an irrelevant cue. For Experiment 1, the discriminations were of the form AX+ BX+ ABX-, where A and B were relevant, X was irrelevant, and + or - indicate whether or not reinforcement was delivered. The discriminations for Experiment 2 were of the form A+ B+ AX+ BX+ ABX-. A subsequent test phase in both experiments revealed that the associability of A and B, and hence the attention paid to these stimuli, was less than the associability of X. The results are explained with a modified version of a configural theory of associative learning.