Advanced conditioning: competition and graphical models
Nathaniel Daw
New York University
In statistical accounts of conditioning, subjects' behavior should reflect their prior assumptions about reinforcer contingency. In particular, behavior should reveal their generative model of stimulus and reinforcer delivery. I discuss two examples. First, attentional and surprise effects in conditioning may reveal subjects' assumptions about how cues compete or cooperate in mixture generative models to predict reinforcement. Second, I discuss how subjects' inferences about generative model structure may explain additional cue-combination phenomena in so-called "configural" conditioning experiments.