Muñiz-Diez Clara, Muñiz-Moreno Judit, Loy Ignacio
Department of Psychology, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain.
Front Behav Neurosci. 2021 Apr 21;15:632548. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2021.632548. eCollection 2021.
The feature negative discrimination (A+/AX) can result in X gaining excitatory properties (second-order conditioning, SOC) or in X gaining inhibitory properties (conditioned inhibition, CI), a challenging finding for most current associative learning theories. Research on the variables that modulate which of these phenomena would occur is scarce but has clearly identified the trial number as an important variable. In the set of experiments presented here, the effect of trial number was assessed in a magazine training task with rats as a function of both the conditioning sessions and the number of A+ and AX trials per session, holding constant the total number of trials per session. The results indicated that SOC is most likely to be found at the beginning of training when there are many A+ and few AX trials, and CI (as assessed by a retardation test) is most likely to be found at the end of training when there are few A+ and many AX trials. Both phenomena were also found at different moments of training when the number of A+ trials was equal to the number of AX trials. These results cannot be predicted by acquisition-focused associative models but can be predicted by theories that distinguish between learning and performance.
特征负性辨别（A+/AX）可能导致X获得兴奋性属性（二级条件作用，SOC）或使X获得抑制性属性（条件性抑制，CI），这一发现对当前大多数联想学习理论构成了挑战。关于调节这些现象中哪一种会发生的变量的研究很少，但已明确将试验次数确定为一个重要变量。在此呈现的一组实验中，在以大鼠为对象的杂志训练任务中评估了试验次数的影响，该影响是条件训练次数以及每次训练中A+和AX试验次数的函数，同时保持每次训练的试验总数不变。结果表明，当A+试验次数多而AX试验次数少时，SOC最有可能出现在训练开始时；而当A+试验次数少而AX试验次数多时，CI（通过延迟测试评估）最有可能出现在训练结束时。当A+试验次数等于AX试验次数时，在训练的不同时刻也会出现这两种现象。这些结果无法通过以习得为重点的联想模型预测，但可以通过区分学习和表现的理论来预测。
