Elemental and Configural Encoding of the Conditioned Stimulus

Abstract

Five experiments explored the effect of conditioning AB and CD compounds on responding to transfer AD and BC compounds and to elements. These experiments used several conditioning procedures: flavour aversion and instrumental discriminative learning in rats and autoshaping in pigeons. All of the experiments found greater responding to the trained AB and CD than to the transfer AD and BC compounds, a result that agrees with some configural models, but not with an elemental model. All experiments also found greater responding to the transfer AD and BC compounds than to the elements, a result that agrees with elemental, but not configural, models.