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Learned Changes in Stimulus Representations (A Personal History)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

Geoffrey Hall
Geoffrey Hall*
Affiliation:
University of York, UK
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr Geoffrey Hall, Department of Psychology, University of York, York YO10 5DD, UK. E-mail: g.hall@psych.york.ac.uk
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Abstract

Almost 40 years ago I began what turned out to be a programme of research on the way in which experience can change the effectiveness of the events used as stimuli in standard associative learning procedures. In this personal history I will describe my early (failed) attempts to find evidence for the acquired distinctiveness of cues, and my conclusion that experience tends to reduce, not enhance the associability of stimuli. I then go on to describe my attempts to square this conclusion with the stubborn empirical fact that, in some circumstances, pretraining with (or preexposure to) stimuli, can facilitate subsequent discrimination between them. I describe experiments (conducted mostly with rats as the subjects) showing how some of these effects can be explained in associative terms. Others, however, seemed to demand an explanation in terms of a new learning process that modulates the effective salience of stimuli. I go on to describe attempts to specify the nature of this process, and (bringing the story up to date) to describe recent experiments investigating the effects of salience modulation in human perceptual learning.

Hace casi 40 años, empecé lo que con el tiempo se convirtió en un programa de investigación sobre la forma en que la experiencia puede cambiar la efectividad de los eventos empleados como estímulos en procedimientos típicos de aprendizaje asociativo. En esta historia personal, describiré mis primeros (fallidos) intentos de demostrar la distintividad adquirida de las claves, y mi conclusión de que la experiencia tiende a reducir, en vez de a facilitar, la asociabilidad de los estímulos. Después paso a describir mis intentos de hacer compatible esta conclusión con el innegable hecho empírico de que, en algunas circunstancias, el pre-entrenamiento con (o la pre-exposición a) los estímulos puede facilitar la posterior discriminación entre ellos. Describo los experimentos (llevados a cabo con ratas como sujetos) que muestran cómo algunos de estos efectos pueden explicarse en términos asociativos. Sin embargo, otros parecen exigir una explicación en términos de un nuevo proceso de aprendizaje que modula la saliencia efectiva de los estímulos. Paso a describir los intentos de especificar la naturaleza de este proceso y (llegando al momento actual) a describir los experimentos recientes que investigan los efectos de modulación de la saliencia en el aprendizaje perceptual humano.

Keywords

associative learningstimulus discriminationpretrainingstimulis salienceperceptual learningaprendizaje asociativodiscriminación estimularpre-entrenamientosaliencia estimularaprendizaje perceptual
Type
Articles
Information
The Spanish Journal of Psychology , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , November 2007 , pp. 218 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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