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. 2008 Sep;61(9):1340-55.
doi: 10.1080/17470210701560310.

Associative interference in Pavlovian conditioning: a function of similarity between the interfering and target associative structures

Jeffrey C Amundson  1 , Ralph R Miller
Affiliations

Associative interference in Pavlovian conditioning: a function of similarity between the interfering and target associative structures

Jeffrey C Amundson et al. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2008 Sep.

Abstract

Three lever-press suppression studies were conducted with water-deprived rats to investigate the role of similarity in proactive interference within first-order Pavlovian conditioning. Experiments la and 1b assessed the influence of stimulus complexity in proactive interference. Both experiments found greater interference when the interfering cue and target cue were composed of the same number of elements. Experiment 2 assessed the influence of context similarity in proactive interference and demonstrated that stronger proactive interference occurred when the interfering cue and the target cue were trained in the same context. The results in conjunction with other reports indicate that various types of cue interaction (e.g., interference and competition) are influenced by similarity of the interacting training events.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Group means of the CS X test in Experiment 1a. The PI groups were those in which proactive interference was expected due to prior training of an interfering cue in Phase 1. The NoPI groups served as basic acquisition controls. Stronger proactive interference is evident in the lower suppression to CS X of group Elemental-PI relative to group Compound-PI and the control groups.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Group means of the CS X test in Experiment 1b. The PI groups were those in which proactive interference was expected due to prior training of an interfering cue in Phase 1. The NoPI groups served as basic acquisition controls. Stronger proactive interference is evident in the lower suppression to CS X of group Elemental-PI relative to group Compound-PI and the control groups.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Group means of the CS X test in Experiment 2. The PI groups were those in which proactive interference was expected due to prior training of an interfering cue in Phase 1. The NoPI groups served as basic acquisition controls. Stronger proactive interference is evident in the lower suppression to CS X of group SameCTX-PI relative to group DiffCTX-PI and the control groups.
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References

    1. Amundson JC, Escobar M, Miller RR. Proactive interference between cues trained with a common outcome in first-order Pavlovian conditioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes. 2003;29:311–322. - PubMed
    1. Amundson JC, Miller RR. CS-US temporal relations in blocking. 2006 Manuscript submitted for publication. - PMC - PubMed
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    1. Blaisdell AP, Denniston JC, Miller RR. Posttraining shifts in the overshadowing stimulus-unconditioned stimulus interval alleviates the overshadowing deficit. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes. 1999;25:18–27. - PubMed

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