Occasion setting.

Abstract

Occasion setting refers to the ability of 1 stimulus, an occasion setter, to modulate the efficacy of the association between another, conditioned stimulus (CS) and an unconditioned stimulus (US) or reinforcer. Occasion setters and simple CSs are readily distinguished. For example, occasion setters are relatively immune to extinction and counterconditioning, and their combination and transfer functions differ substantially from those of simple CSs. Similarly, the acquisition of occasion setting is favored when stimuli are separated by longer intervals, by empty trace intervals, and are of different modalities, whereas the opposite conditions typically favor the acquisition of simple associations. Furthermore, the simple conditioning and occasion setting properties of a single stimulus can be independent, for example, that stimulus may simultaneously predict the occurrence of a reinforcer and indicate that another stimulus will not be reinforced. Many behavioral phenomena that are intractable to simple associative analysis are better understood within an occasion setting framework. Besides capturing the distinction between direct and modulatory control common to many arenas in neuroscience, occasion setting provides a model for the hierarchical organization of memory for events and event relations, and for contextual control more broadly. Although early lesion studies further differentiated between occasion setting and simple conditioning functions, little is known about the neurobiology of occasion setting. Modern techniques for precise manipulation and monitoring of neuronal activity in multiple brain regions are ideally suited for disentangling contributions of simple conditioning and occasion setting in associative learning.

Dopaminergic contributions to behavioral control under threat of punishment in rats

“…Whether this lack of any distinct neural activity patterns during the threat cue is in line with these neurons encoding value-related signals is subject to debate. For example, one may argue to expect (1) downward, negative prediction error-like, transients, (2) upward transients, signaling the receipt of sucrose, or (3) a suppression of a pellet delivery-induced positive transient by the threat cue, for example, because of counterconditioning (Dickinson and Pearce 1977) or due to the cue acting as a discriminative stimulus or "occasion setter" (Fraser and Holland 2019). In addition, in well-trained animals, the threat cue does not have to be aversive per se, as it may merely predict upcoming (delayed) reward and not punishment (which can be prevented by waiting).…”

Occasion setters attain incentive motivational value: implications for contextual influences on reward-seeking

“…setting cue and the ability of this cue to enhance conditioned approach to an ambiguous CS. This suggests that the incentive and predictive properties of the occasion setting cue are not readily explained by existing associative models (Fraser and Holland 2019).…”

“…While much is known about the predictive and incentive properties of cues that have a deterministic, absolute relationship with reward availability (Robinson and Flagel 2009;Meyer et al 2014;Ahrens et al 2016), considerably less is known about ambiguous cues and the factors that regulate their predictive and motivational value. We assessed whether a special class of cues that regulate the strength of an ambiguous cue-reward relationship, called OSs (Holland 1992;Meyer and Bucci 2016;Shobe et al 2017;Fraser and Holland 2019), could engender their own incentive motivational properties. We find that while cues trained as OSs do not obligatorily elicit reward seeking on their own, they acquire incentive salience and can act to enhance both the predictive and motivational value of a CS.…”

“…For instance, a context may enter into a direct relationship with reward such that when a weakly predictive cue is presented it triggers responding as a result of summing the strength of the context-reward and cue-reward relationships. Others have proposed that contexts act in a more complex way as occasion setters (OS) which would instill them with the ability to resolve the ambiguity of reward-predictive cues (Grahame et al 1990;Holland and Bouton 1999;Valyear et al 2017;Fraser and Holland 2019). To date, however, there has been little investigation into the precise psychological mechanisms underlying context-induced effects on reward-seeking behavior.…”

Ambiguity Drives Higher-Order Pavlovian Learning

“…From a Pavlovian perspective, the parent needs to learn which stimuli, situational factors, or contexts determine whether the child (CS) will behave badly (US). One of the primary Pavlovian experimental designs investigating ambiguous CSs is occasion setting ( [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9], in which an occasion setter is a stimulus that indicates whether the CS will result in the US. In this case, perhaps the child has a friend that is a bad influence, and when the child sees this friend in the afternoon, the child behaves badly later that night.…”