ABSTRACT
This chapter compares the acquisition or reacquisition of the keypecking conditioned response (CR) to a keylight conditioned stimuli (CS), following pretraining with unpredictable US presentations. Recently, Balsam in both ring doves and pigeons, has found a negative between-subjects correlation between activity level and the speed of acquisition of autoshaping, indicating that subjects that exhibit strong activity CRs are retarded in acquiring the keypecking CR. Moreover, Balsam has found that the activity CR is conditioned to keylight CSs whose predictiveness of the US is too weak to support autoshaping acquisition. The contextual keylight is present during all US presentations, thus maximizing the number of context-US pairings, and, presumably, the conditioning of the context. A number of investigators using aversive Pavlovian-conditioning procedures have shown that the conditioning of a randomly presented discrete CS is modulated by the conditioning of the contextual cues.
