Processing of Expected and Unexpected Events During Conditioning and Attention: A Psychophysiological Theory

Abstract

Abstract Some recent formal models of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning contain internal paradoxes that restrict their predictive power. These paradoxes can be traced to an inadequate formulation of how mechanisms of short-term memory and long-term memory work together to control the shifting balance between the processing of expected and unexpected events. Once this formulation is strengthened, a unified processing framework is suggested wherein attentional and orienting subsystems coexist in a complementary relationship that controls the adaptive self-organization of internal representations in response to expected and unexpected events. In this framework, conditioning and attentional constructs can be more directly validated by interdisciplinary paradigms in which seemingly disparate phenomena can be shown to share similar physiological and pharmacological mechanisms. A model of cholinergic-catecholaminergic interactions suggests how drive, reinforcer, and arousal inputs regulate motivational baseline, hysteresis, and rebound, with the hippocampus as a final common path. Extinction, conditioned emotional responses, conditioned avoidance responses, secondary conditioning, and inverted U effects also occur. A similar design in sensory and cognitive representations suggests how short-term memory reset and attentional resonance occur and are related to evoked potentials such as N200, P300, and contingent negative variation (CNV). Competitive feedback properties such as pattern matching, contrast enhancement, and normalization of short-term memory patterns make possible the hypothesis testing procedures that search for and define new internal representations in response to unexpected events. Long-term memory traces regulate adaptive filtering, expectancy learning, conditioned reinforcer learning, incentive motivational learning, and habit learning. When these mechanisms act together, conditioning phenomena such as overshadowing, unblocking, latent inhibition, overexpectation, and behavioral contrast emerge.