Contextual control as occasion setting.

Acquired relational equivalence between contexts and features.

“…The stimuli (A, B, C, and D) used in the Honey and Watt study were what many would regard as features: They were short in duration and presented immediately prior to the targets. A number of authors, most notably Bouton and his colleagues (see Bouton, 1991;Bouton & Swartzentruber, 1986;Swartzentruber, 1991;see also, Hall & Honey, 1989;Hall & Mondragon, 1998) have argued that animals might also learn that specific associative relationships are in force in some environmental contexts but not in others. Accordingly, the two experiments described in this article sought answers to two related questions: First, will an acquired relational equivalence effect be evident between two contexts that have signaled the same associations?…”

“…In Experiment 1, we adapted the experimental strategy deployed by Honey and Watt (1998;see Table 1) to investigate the suggestion that a context can influence a target's ability to elicit a CR by engaging or priming associative information involving that target (see Bouton, 1991;Bouton & Swartzentruber, 1986;Hall & Mondragon, 1998;Swartzentruber, 1991). The design requires the use of four experimental contexts (A, B, C, and D) and two target stimuli (X and Y).…”

“…and (b) will such an effect be evident between a context and a conventional feature that have signaled the same associations? A positive answer to the first question will establish that contexts, like features (Honey & Watt, 1998), can serve an occasion-setting function; that is, they can retrieve specific associations (see Bouton, 1991;Bouton & Swartzentruber, 1986;Hall & Mondragon, 1998). A positive answer to the second question will indicate that contexts and features operate on shared associative structures (see also, Swartzentruber, 1991).…”

“…However, several authors have suggested that ambient, contextual cues in which targets are embedded, might function in an analogous fashion to conventional features (see Bouton, 1991;Bouton & Swartzentruber, 1986;Hall & Mondragon, 1998;Swartzentruber, 1991). That is, it has been suggested that when an animal is placed in an operant chamber with a specific decoration and odor (a context) and receives pairings of a target with an outcome, subsequent placement in the same context will "set the occasion" for the retrieval of the association between representations of the target and that outcome.…”

The dual role of the context in postpeak performance decrements resulting from extended training

“…Although several functions of contextual information are widely acknowledged (Balsam, 1985;Bouton, 2010;Hall & Mondragón, 1998;Holland & Bouton, 1999;Miller & Schachtman, 1985;Urcelay & Miller, 2010), little is known about the conditions that favor one or the other of these functions being revealed. Gaining knowledge concerning these determinants is critical because, at a theoretical level, the two broad functions highlighted above (i.e., competitive vs. modulatory) have previously been treated separately, but rarely in an integrated fashion.…”