The Hall-Pearce (1979) negative transfer effect in rats was used to examine whether temporal relationships are coded as part of the informational content of associations that result from CS-US pairings. The transfer effect consists of adeficit in conditioned responding following CS-USstrong pairings in Phase 2 that results from prior CS-USweak pairings in Phase 1. Using conditioned bar-press suppression, we found that gaps of different duration between CS termination and US onset in the two training phases resulted in less of a Hall-Pearce negative transfer effect than did an equivalent gap in the twotraining phases. The results are discussed with respect tothe temporal coding hypothesis (Matzel, Held, & Miller, 1988), the Pearce and Hall (1980) model, and Bouton's (1993) interference model.
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