Acceso usuarios
María Manuela Moreno Fernández, María J. F. Abad, Manuel M. Ramos Alvarez, Juan Manuel Rosas Santos
Predictive value for continuously reinforced cues is affected by context changes when they are trained within a context in which a different cue undergoes partial reinforcement. An experiment was conducted with the goal of exploring the mechanisms underlying this context-switch effect. Human participants were trained in a predictive learning situation in which a cue received partial reinforcement while a target cue received continuous reinforcement in context A (C1) and another target cue was presented unreinforced in context B (U2). Participants in group Partial-One did not receive partial reinforcement in context B, while participants in group Partial-Both received the same training they received in context A, but with different cues. When target cues were tested in group Partial-One, greater responding in context A than in context B was found. Differences were smaller in cue U2 than in cue C1. No differences across contexts were found in group Partial-Both. These results are in agreement with the hypothesis that context-switch effects after partial reinforcement are mainly due to the formation of direct context-outcome associations, though the difference on the effect size on the reinforced and unreinforced cues suggests that a modulator mechanism may be also responsible for these context-switch effects.
