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Robert Rescorla: Time, Information and Contingency.

2021; Colegio Oficial de Psicólogos de Madrid; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5093/rhp2021a3

2445-0928

C. R. Gallistel,

Cognitive Science and Education Research

Rescorla's first theoretical and experimental papers on the truly random control (random, independent presentations of CSs and USs) showed that associative learning was driven by contingency, that is, by the information that events at one time provide about events located elsewhere in time.This discovery has revolutionary neurobiological and philosophical implications.The problem was that Rescorla was unable to derive a function that mapped conditional probabilities into contingencies.Rescorla and Wagner (1972) proposed a hugely influential model for explaining Rescorla's results, but their model ignored his earlier insights about time, temporal order, information and contingency in conditioning.Their paper pioneered an empirically indefensible treatment of time that has continued in associative theorizing down to the present day.A key to a more defensible approach to the cue competition problem (aka the temporal assignment of credit problem) in Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning is to measure the information that cues and responses provide about the wait for reinforcement and the information that reinforcement provides about the recency of a response.