The major issue in the study of animal learning has been the processes involved in how an animal associates two events with each other. The traditional answer to this question has been that such associations are formed automatically because the two events occur at the same time, or one event occurs just before the other. But we now know that such an answer is too simple, because the strength of the association depends critically upon the context of events in which the two events occur. For example, if an animal is presented a pairing of sound with food, the likelihood of a sound-food association may vary, depending upon whether or not other events in the conditioning environment have a pre-existing association with food. Dr. Williams will analyze the behavioral processes underlying such contextual effects, for a variety of different conditioning procedures. Such analysis is important because basic conditioning processes have been used increasingly in studies of neural organization with primitive animals (e.g., Aplysia) and now form the basis of neural-network models that constitute the major theoretical development in human cognitive psychology in the past decade. Thus, a proper understanding of how contextual effects are mediated has major implications for several different areas of psychology and physiology.
