Situational cues and correlation between CS and US as determinants of the conditioned emotional response

Abstract

Administering unsignaled USs during daily CER training sessions interfered with CER conditioning, as has frequently been reported. This effect was reduced, however, when additional daily sessions were administered during which Ss were simply exposed to the experimental environment in the absence of the CS and US. The results indicate that S’s treatment with respect to “situational” cues is important in the determination of CS-US contingency effects, and are in agreement with recent formulations of Wagner (in press, a) and Rescorla (in press) which emphasize that the degree of conditioning to a CS depends upon the associative strength of the constellation of cues in which the CS is imbedded during training.