Information, certainty, and learning

More than four decades ago, Gibbon and Balsam (1981) showed that the acquisition of Pavlovian conditioning in pigeons is directly related to the informativeness of the conditioning stimulus (CS) about the unconditioned stimulus (US), where informativeness is defined as the ratio of the US-US interval ( C ) to the CS-US interval ( T ). However, the evidence for this relationship in other species has been equivocal. Here, we describe an experiment that measured the acquisition of appetitive Pavlovian conditioning in 14 groups of rats trained with different C / T ratios (ranging from 1.5 to 300) to establish how learning is related to informativeness. We show that the number of trials required for rats to start responding to the CS is determined by the C / T ratio, and the specific scalar relationship between the rate of learning and informativeness is similar to that previously obtained with pigeons. We also found that the response rate after extended conditioning is strongly related to T , with the terminal CS response rate being a scalar function of the CS reinforcement rate (1/ T ). Moreover, this same scalar relationship extended to the rats’ overall response rates (during the CS and inter-trial interval) which was directly proportional to the overall rate of reinforcement in the context (1/ C ). The findings establish that animals encode rates of reinforcement, and that conditioning is directly related to how much information the CS provides about the US. The consistency of these observations across species, captured by a simple regression function, suggests a universal model of conditioning.

More than a century of laboratory-based research has been devoted to investigating how animals learn about simple relationships between events, such as learning to respond to a conditioned stimulus (CS) that is followed by an unconditioned stimulus (US) or learning to perform a specific action that is reinforced by a rewarding US. Much of that research has focussed on identifying what properties about the CS-US or response-US relationship are most important for learning. There is widespread consensus about the importance of three particular properties. One is the temporal contiguity between the events: conditioning emerges sooner when the US follows the CS or response closely in time. Another is the spacing of the learning trials: conditioning takes fewer trials when there is a long time-interval between each CS-US or response-US pairing. The third property is the contingency between the events: conditioning is more successful when the US occurs reliably in the presence of the CS or response, and does not occur in their absence.