Reminder-induced attenuation of the effect of relative stimulus validity

Abstract

The roles of deficient acquisition and deficient expression of learned information in the effect of relative stimulus validity were examined using rats in a conditioned lick suppression paradigm. Recovery from the effect without further pairings of the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US) would favor an interpretation of the relative validity effect based on a latent CS-US association as distinct from a failure to acquire the CS-US association. As a potential recovery manipulation, “reminder” treatments, consisting of the US alone (Experiment 1) or the CS alone (Experiment 2), were administered following relative validity training. In both cases, subjects for which the CS target was of low relative predictive validity exhibited enhanced responding relative to appropriate controls. Additionally, Experiment 2 showed that the amelioration of the relative validity deficit was stimulus specific. Thus, the results of these experiments support previous suggestions that the performance deficit resulting from low relative stimulus validity is due, at least in part, to a failure to express acquired information (Cole, Barnet, & Miller, 1995a).