Conditions favoring superconditioning of irrelevant conditioned stimuli

Three appetitive conditioning experiments with rats found partial learning of complex XA+, XB+, XAB- ("+" stands for reinforced; "-" stands for unreinforced) negative patterning discriminations with intermixed A+ and B+ trials (Experiment 1), AB+ trials (Experiment 2), and A+, B+, and AB+ trials (Experiment 3). In all experiments, differential responding emerged more slowly during the learning of the negative patterning discriminations than during learning of the XA+, XB+, XC- control discriminations. Additionally, the negative patterning groups responded more to X than to a separately reinforced Y on unreinforced test trials; thus, X derived superexcitatory properties. This pattern was reversed in the control groups. Results are consistent with theories that allow for different activation patterns when elements are combined.