Pavlovian Conditioning: It's not what you think it is - Part II.

Abstract

In a highly cited paper, Rescorla (1988) argued that conditioning can be thought of as involving active information seeking and causal reasoning. In this paper, I argue that the full implications of this perspective are yet to be explored. The idea of causal reasoning (a) does not fit well with the association formation models that currently dominate conditioning research and (b) goes beyond the notion of prediction error as the dominant source of learning. As such, Rescorla’s (1988) perspective is bound to remain a source of inspiration for future research.