Hierarchical and configural control in conditional discrimination learning

Considerable discussion has concerned the role of context in conditional discrimination learning. Some authors have proposed that contexts might operate hierarchically on CS-US associations, whereas others have proposed that the context plus the CS might be processed configurally. In the present article, we report the results of two experiments that assessed the role of context on pigeons' conditional discrimination learning. In Experiment 1, we found that our pigeons' responding was inconsistent with hierarchical processing; instead, they may have either relied on local features or on configural compounds comprising the context and the discriminative stimulus presented on each trial. In Experiment 2, we precluded the possibility of using local features by requiring the pigeons to attend to both of the compounds that were simultaneously presented on each trial to solve the task. Methodological and theoretical issues are discussed in light of this work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).