The Blocking Effect free essay sample

Examines causes effects of this obstacle to conditioning as factor in behavioral experimentation with animals human learning. The apparent influence of informational factors on associative learning has been the focus of much attention by investigators who wished to account for this phenomenon within the classical Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. One of the most influential concepts in this area has been Kamins (1969) notion of the blocking effect which he identified in animal experiments. Blocking describes the situation in which the prior conditioning of a subject to a conditioned stimulus (A) of a stimulus compound (AB) inhibits conditioning to the second conditioned stimulus B when the compound is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US). The proof of the blocking effect is provided by trials in which blocking does not take place when an unconditioned stimulus other than the one for which A had been previously conditioned is introduced to the compound AB (Dickinson, 1977, cited by Bonardi