Reading focus
Syllabus: How Does Experience Change Behavior?
Organize the argument around the circumstances of learning, its content, and its expression.
Why you’re reading it. Develop a framework for predictive learning before evaluating a particular experiment.
A question to consider. A workshop signal often sounds before supplies arrive. What would arrivals without the signal tell the volunteer about its usefulness?
Why this reading
Rescorla challenges the idea that conditioning is adequately explained by repeatedly placing two events together. He separates the conditions producing learning, what is learned, and how learning becomes behavior.
Before you read
In Pavlovian conditioning, a conditioned stimulus (CS) is a cue studied in relation to an unconditioned stimulus (US), such as food. Contiguity concerns closeness in time; contingency concerns whether one event changes the probability of another.
Read for
- Ask what each example adds beyond counting cue–outcome pairings.
- Distinguish learning about an outcome from learning a fixed response to a cue.
- Identify which claims concern learning itself and which concern its expression.
Consider afterwards
- A signal often precedes a delivery. What would you need to know about deliveries without the signal before judging its usefulness?
Editorial context
The review presents a theoretical synthesis of evidence available in 1988. Its language of representation need not imply conscious reasoning. It provides a framework for interpreting experiments, not a final comparison of all contemporary learning theories.