Re: Conditioned Taste Aversion (was metablather)


"Michael Olea" <oleaj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Glen M. Sizemore wrote:


"Michael Olea" <oleaj@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Glen M. Sizemore wrote:



"JAK" <jak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Michael, I'll await your response.

Glen, in deference to the task before Michael, I would still like you
to isolate a specific, fundamental experiment as a target for
discussion. Michael's point is well taken. It's tough to "boil the
ocean" (or even a lake). Please declare something a bit more
manageable.

Thanks - JAK


Well, I did talk about a class of experiments. In general, the
experiments
I am talking about are concerned with the fundamental nature of
conditioning; is it a temporal phenomenon, or does it require the
notion
of some long-term correlations between stimuli or between responses and
consequences. These experiments must be considered together - that is
where it becomes confusing. But, anyway, it seems to me that Michael's
task is not that great. He made some assertions about learning and
probability distributions etc. I would like a basic, simple statement
from
him concerning how these issues relate to classical and operant
conditioning.



It seems to me that the old "temporal contiguity notion" is holding its
own. I lean in that direction for a couple of reasons. A big reason is
that "unsignalled, delayed reinforcement, produces lower rates of
response
than immediate reinforcement. In order for correlation to play any
role,
the relevant time scale would have to be very, very short. But the
noise
at such time scales is so great that one wonders how differences
(between immediate and delayed reinforcement) could be detectable.
Plus,
there's the whole issue of the "molar" view starting out talking about
long-term correlations, then being forced to squeeze the time scale
down
to one that
approaches that at which the "contiguity" people operate. There are
other reasons, but the issue is sort of complex. That complexity, and
the large experimental literature that exists in a filed that Michael
has denigrated, is part of the source of my challenge to him.

Garcia, J. and R. A. Koelling. 1966. Relation of cue to consequence in
avoidance learning. Psychon Sci 4:123-4.



http://www.uwf.edu/psych/bmikulas/Webpage/learning/section%20two.htm#relationofcue
(fixed broken link; thanks, Joe)

I'm quite familiar with this paper by Rescorla.

Actually I was pointing to the paper by Garcia and Koelling, which reports
experiments on what has subsequently sometimes been called "conditioned
taste aversion". I'm sure you are familiar with these, but for the rest of
CAP, these are experiments in which rats were made sick to their stomachs
when they drank water, either because the water was toxic, or because the
rats were subjected to ionizing radiation. In the Garcia and Koelling
study
the water was either "bright and noisy" or "tasty" (sweet or salty), or
both. Two results are interesting: 1) the conditioned rats avoided tasty
water, but not bright and noisy water - you might say, if you were in an
interpretive mood, that they formed associations between nausea and
gustatory cues, but not between nausea and audiovisual cues; 2) taste
aversion occurs even when there is a long delay (as in hours) between cue
(taste) and consequence (nausea). Moreover, when drinking "bright and
noisy" water, or drinking "tasty" water was paired with mild electrical
shock the rats subsequently avoided "bright and noisy" water but not
"tasty" water. Waxing interpretive once again, you might say the rats
associated audiovisual cues with shock, but did not associate gustatory
cues with shock. Get sick to your stomach, must have been the last thing
you ate, even if that was hours ago; get shocked, probably has nothing to
do with gustatory stimuli but rather with some audio or visual or tactile
event in close temporal contiguity with the shock event.

All of this would seem to make sense from an evolutionary biological point
of view (and, as I might argue later, time permiting, from a statstical
learning theory point of view) but it does seem to pose, at least at first
glance, some problems for the notion that classical and operant
conditioning alone are enough to account for all forms of learning. If
nothing else, the results suggest associative hypothesis space is divided
into domains (i.e. product spaces composed of at least two disjoint
cue/consequence domains).

Science is much more concerned with similarities than differences. What is
the utility of subdividing the domain?



More papers on CTA are available here:

http://www.magnet.neuro.fsu.edu/Papers/classicCTA.html

I have no problem with the
truly random control procedure (TRCP) but it doesn't carry the
theoretical
significance that you think it does. ...

This, and the rest of what you wrote is interesting stuff, Glen, but right
now Hullian drive reduction has me thinking about tacos. Maybe I can pick
up the thread later tonight. For one thing, the RW delta rule can be
derived, given certain assumptions, from Bayesian decision theory. More
interesting, though, is to find conditions under which BTD and RW lead to
different predictions. Anyway, I'm starving.

Later.

-- Michael



.

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