Equating context conditioning in Pavlovian incubation of US signal value.

The present study replicated the finding by Goddard (2013), that when a single food pellet unconditioned stimulus (US) signaled the delivery of three additional pellets, responding after the single US was significantly greater on a delayed, compared to an early, test. Importantly, the present study equated context conditioning by delivering the identical number of food pellets in both conditioning and testing and showed that responding was significantly reduced in control subjects that had received unpaired single food-triple food presentations. Implications for theories of conditioning are considered.