Balsam & Gallistel (2009) have a theory of conditioning (paper linked) that basically indicates that temporal information is the critical learned information in an associative learning paradigm. The paper includes many different variants of conditioning protocols and some expected results. However the results don't make much intuitive sense to me. Firstly I'm not clear on whether background rates represent USs per non-CS ITIs only or if they represent USs at all times during the paradigm (US rate during ITI+CS).
In their paper on page 9 they say the 'basic' protocol - wherein a US can occur at any time but ONLY during the CS - a CR should not develop but this makes no sense to me. If the background rate represents the number of USs during the ITI then that value is 0 and the equation is unsolvable (1/0) whereas if the background rate is the rate of USs during the ITI+CS then it will be equal to the CS rate (e.g. 1 if only 1 UCS is presented during any point in the CS which, for sake of argument, I'd like to assume) which will cause the equation to evaluate to 0. This is indeed what the paper says but if this is true then I have two questions:
1) Why DOES a CR develop to this protocol as the Figure 1 caption on page 3 indicates?
2) Why would this be any different from a regular Delay conditioning paradigm where the CS predicts the UCS with 100% accuracy at the same time every time? Here the CS rate and BG rate are still both 1 so the first part of the second equation on page 9 resolves to 0 and what is left is essentially the Weber fraction.
Additionally, if I had a variable timed UCS administration protocol similar to the idea presented here but not truly random (e.g. A constant 8s CS with a UCS presented on 100% of trials but at different times during the CS with specific limitations such as 2 UCSs at 2s, 14 UCSs at 8s, etc.) could anyone tell me how I could calculate the CSs informativeness?
Thanks so much!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19136158
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