In excitatory conditioning we learn that the stimulus conditioned is followed by the unconditioned and, by virtue of this, it provokes a conditioned response. Excitatory conditioning has two different forms: appetitive and the conditioning of defending.
- Appetitive classical conditioning is what we have already explained, and the essential thing is that the unconditioned stimulus is pleasant.
- In classical defense conditioning the unconditioned stimulus is aversive.
Inhibitory conditioning In inhibitory conditioning you learn that when conditioned stimulus is not followed by the unconditioned stimulus and, therefore, a response will hardly be produced. In the event that inhibitory conditioning provoked a response, this would be a response opposite to the excitatory conditioned response and, in this sense, it causes its extinction.
Inhibitory conditioning is the process of presenting the EI only in some trials; In some trials the EI follows EC; in other trials E.C. It is followed by another different neutral stimulus, without following the appearance of the EI; in this way the E.C. becomes a sign of the absence of EI. The trials in which the CS is presented paired with another neutral stimulus, without the US appearing, are trials that Pavlov proposed as representative of the process, and have been called inhibitory conditioning. Inhibitory conditioning is something very important for the lives of animals, because it is very important to know what stimuli will not be presented. Today much importance is given to its study.
However, today, what has acquired greater importance is the study of the latent inhibition (which is actually learning from unique stimuli and not learning by association of stimuli). In latent inhibition what happens is that the previous representation of a stimulus means that later, that stimulus, if it is used to produce conditioning, learning takes longer to occur:
- Thus there is an inhibition, since the appearance of the learning with that encouragement
- but this is latent, because what is inhibited is the power availability of that stimulus to produce learning.
That is, “unreinforced” presentations of a neutral stimulus, prior to conditioning, significantly delay subsequent conditioning of that neutral stimulus. The conditionability of a stimulus to produce learning is a parameter that is not an absolute property of the stimulus, but rather changes with the experience that the subject has of it. Mackintosh He thought that pre-exposure to a neutral stimulus produces learned irrelevance; That is, that stimulus does not signal anything important for the organism.
Consequently, when this stimulus is used to associate with an unconditioned stimulus and produce learning, it becomes difficult for the organism to learn that this stimulus signals the appearance of the unconditioned stimulus. This seems to be an inhibition, however, assuming that prior exposure to a neutral stimulus produced inhibition, this would facilitate that stimulus helping the formation of inhibitory conditioning, but the experimental results have not been the case. Variables that influence the acquisition of conditioning The main variables that influence the acquisition of conditioning are:
- The causal relevance: tells us which stimuli are easier to condition with each other
- Previous experience with the stimuli can influence the strength with which conditioning occurs.
From this variable, two important phenomena stand out:
- latent inhibition; produced by repeated and previous exposure to the isolated CD.
- The learned irrelevance; produced by the previous exposure of the EC and the IS without any type of connection between them.