External inhibition of the conditioned eyelid reflex.

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Presentation of an extraneous auditory stimulus at the midpoint of the conditional stimulus-unconditional stimulus interval is shown to inhibit the blink reflex conditioned to a light. Although such inhibition appears to be unrelated to the number of prior reinforcements, its occurrence in individual human subjects is inversely related to the total number of conditional responses produced. Evidence is also presented to suggest that the same stimulus which acts as an external inhibitor in acquisition functions as a disinhibitor if presented following partial extinction, but this suggestion is attenuated by the absence of proper controls. The results are discussed in terms of their providing a technique for examining the Pavlovian implications of these phenomena at the human level.

This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit: