Sahley C L, Boulis N M, Schurman B
Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 49707.
Behav Neurosci. 1994 Apr;108(2):340-6. doi: 10.1037//0735-7044.108.2.340.
Three experiments addressed the importance of the inter-event relationships of contiguity and contingency for associative learning in the semi-intact leech. It was found that both of these relationships are important for the leech to acquire a learned association between a touch (conditional stimulus, CS) and shock (unconditional stimulus, US). The learning can be extinguished if training is followed by explicitly unpaired presentations of the CS and US, which removes the contiguity between the stimuli. Learning is degraded by the introduction of unpredicted USs, as well as by unreinforced presentations of the CS (CS preexposure), both manipulations reduce the contingency between the CS and US. These results suggest that the associative process in both vertebrates and invertebrates share considerable functional similarity in the inter-event relationships important to learning.
三项实验探讨了时间接近性和关联性的事件间关系对半完整水蛭联想学习的重要性。研究发现，这两种关系对于水蛭习得触碰（条件刺激，CS）与电击（无条件刺激，US）之间的习得性关联都很重要。如果在训练后明确地对CS和US进行非配对呈现，即消除刺激之间的接近性，那么学习就会消退。引入未预测到的US以及CS的非强化呈现（CS预暴露）都会使学习退化，这两种操作都会降低CS和US之间的关联性。这些结果表明，脊椎动物和无脊椎动物的联想过程在对学习很重要的事件间关系方面具有相当大的功能相似性。
