ABSTRACT
How do we learn? What are the processes that drive learning in both animals and humans? Are we simply tracking contingencies between specific events, or does the history and prior knowledge of events have an effect on how we learn about new relationships? Early theories of animal and associative learning (Hebb, 1949; Konorski, 1948; Spence, 1936, 1937) only concerned themselves with simple stimulus-response or input-output connections where both learning and responding were governed principally by the strength of the links between nodes (relative to some asymptote) and the activations of the nodes. More modern versions of this type of approach can account for many of the associative learning phenomena prevalent in the literature, both human and animal, such as blocking, overshadowing, and inhibition (e.g., Rescorla & Wagner, 1972). The types of effect we investigate in this chapter are those that pose problems for these simple yet relatively powerful models of learning.
