Abstract

BERNAL-GAMBOA, Rodolfo et al. Generalization among Contexts as a Function of Training Humans in an Instrumental Task. Acta de investigación psicol [online]. 2012, vol.2, n.3, pp.792-807. ISSN 2007-4719.

León, Abad and Rosas (2010b) shown that as the training increased attention to the context decreased. Thus, increasing the training might produce a greater generalization between different contexts. The main goal of the present experiments was to test this idea modifying different values of the context (i. e., colors) using an instrumental task with humans. The task was a videogame in which participants performed under an IV2s schedule in presence of different discriminative stimuli to obtain reinforces. In Experiment 1 two groups were trained with 3 or 8 trials, then a test trial was conducted in the training context (i. e., yellow) or in a different context (i. e., red). Results shown that changed the context produced a loss of performance. In Experiment 2 two groups were trained with similar parameters used in Experiment 1 but using an orange context. Test was conducted with different values of the orange (i. e., training context) toward yellow and red. The pattern of the data suggests that experience with the task modulates in different ways attention to contextual cues.

Keywords : Context-switch effect; Human; Instrumental conditioning; Level of training.