Low occasion setter salience results in learning conditional stimulus partial reinforcement instead of occasion setting
Weak conditional cues teach partial reinforcement, not true occasion setting, so boost salience before you train.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers tested how loud or bright a cue must be before people treat it as a true occasion setter. Adults without disabilities pressed keys for points while colored lights told them when points were coming.
Some lights were bright and easy to notice. Others were dim. The team then removed the points to watch what each group had actually learned.
What they found
Bright cues led to fast extinction and clear occasion setting. The learners quickly stopped responding when the cue no longer signaled reward.
Dim cues led to slow extinction and partial reinforcement learning. People kept pressing because they thought the cue sometimes worked.
How this fits with other research
Crane et al. (2008) also used extinction to reveal hidden learning. They showed that after you remove the strongest cue, weaker ones regain control. Barnes-Horowitz now adds that if the cue starts weak, people never treat it as a true rule.
Matson et al. (2013) found that extra social praise during extinction did not help. The new study agrees that simply adding or removing reward is not enough; cue strength decides what is learned.
Allen et al. (1989) showed that even negative cues can reinforce behavior if they give information. Barnes-Horowitz flips this idea: when a cue gives poor information because it is hard to see, learners treat it as only partly linked to reward.
Why it matters
Check the salience of your conditional stimuli before you start discrimination training. If the green card, soft beep, or hand signal is too faint, the client may learn partial reinforcement instead of true if-then rules. Make cues bright, loud, or salient enough to control behavior the first time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In real-world settings, stimulus and outcome associations often depend on situational factors, such as Pavlovian occasion setters (OSs), which disambiguate whether a conditional stimulus (CS) will predict an outcome (unconditional stimulus; US). Whereas previous studies show that OSs are often lower in salience than CSs, no study has examined how low-salience OSs affect learning. In two conditioning experiments, we investigated this from the premise that inconsistently reinforced CSs prompt searching for additional stimuli (OSs) that indicate whether the CS will be followed by the US. Occasion setting learning was assessed using extinction rate-as partial reinforcement slows extinction relative to continuous reinforcement-and self-reported latent learning of stimuli. We hypothesized that a high-salience OS would result in faster extinction rates and occasion setting learning, whereas a low-salience OS would result in slower extinction rates and CS partial reinforcement learning. The results of Experiment 1 were mixed; there was no effect of OS salience on extinction rate, but the results for latent learning supported the hypothesis. We conducted Experiment 2 to specifically test extinction rate, and the results supported our hypothesis. The findings suggest that if a salient OS is found, occasion setting is learned; otherwise, CS partial reinforcement is learned.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 2025 · doi:10.1002/jeab.70014