Abstract
Psychologists studying conditioning in animals have developed the traditional notion of association formation to produce formal theories of the mechanisms involved that have wide explanatory power. Some indeed have suggested that the associative principle underlies all instances of learning. This suggestion is challenged by the existence of a range of perceptual learning phenomena, taken to indicate that the perceptual effectiveness of events (stimuli) can be changed by experience. It has been asserted that the learning process involved in such change is not associative. This book examines this assertion, concentrating on instances of possible perceptual learning effects that can be demonstrated in the experimental paradigms that have provided the basis for associative theory. The aim is to analyse the nature of these effects, to determine which can and which cannot be accommodated by our standard associative principles, and, for those that cannot, to specify how the standard theory must be modified in order to deal with them.

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