Associations in human instrumental conditioning

Abstract

Four experiments were conducted to study the contents of human instrumental conditioning. Experiment 1 found positive transfer between a discriminative stimulus (SD) and an instrumental response (R) that shared the outcome (O) with the response that was originally trained with the SD, showing the formation of an SD → O association. Experiment 2 found that post-acquisition devaluation of an outcome selectively reduced the response trained with that outcome, showing the formation of a R → O association. In Experiment 3, changing the outcome did not prevent participants from giving the response learned with each SD, even though none of the responses was appropriate for the new outcome, showing evidence of the formation of SD → R associations in instrumental learning. The three binary associations were shown within the same basic experimental situation. Finally, Experiment 4 found evidence of the formation of the higher order association SD(R → O) in human instrumental conditioning.