ABSTRACT
In Chapter 3, nothing is assumed to be built into the animals’ nervous systems that makes S food become able to trigger swallowing in hungry animals. The connections becomes stronger because of an outside contingency: that swallowing when food is in the mouth could remove the hunger stimulation. Consequently, any other stimulus, such as the ringing of a bell, that was invariably present before R in relieved hunger but not present at other times would be expected to develop its own strong connections with R in. This alone could cause classical conditioning to occur. Other factors, however, are at least equally important. There now is an existing strongly connected pathway, S food–(and Sh –) Sh+ food–R in, that will influence learning. In addition to this pathway itself, it is very likely that there are strong inhibitory connections from the pathway that will also enhance learning.
