Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening

Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill‐equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy for this purpose. Using interview data in which early years practitioners reflect on a listening walk, we show how the method can: (i) produce heightened multisensory experiences of spaces; (ii) generate forms of difficulty and discomfort that produce new learning; and (iii) influence practice, particularly practitioners’ ability to empathise with young children. Listening walks function by disrupting everyday sensory habits, provoking listeners to listen anew to their own listening, in an open‐ended way that is not tied to predetermined learning outcomes. The method therefore has wider pedagogic potential for rethinking education and childhood beyond rationality, representation and meaning.     

The influence of partner cues on the extinction of causal judgments in people

Studies in laboratory animals have shown that the extinction of a conditioned stimulus, A, is regulated by the associative history of a second stimulus, X, when the two are extinguished in simultaneous compound: An inhibitory X protects A from extinction (Rescorla Learning & Behavior, 31, 124–132, 2003), whereas an excitatory X facilitates, and under some circumstances deepens, the extinction of A (Rescorla Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 26, 251–260, 2000, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 32, 135–144, 2006). In the present study, we used the allergist task to examine whether the extinction of causal judgments in people is similarly regulated by the causal status of co-present stimuli. Experiment 1 showed that a cue trained as a conditioned inhibitor protected a target cue from extinction: The target extinguished in compound with the inhibitor was rated as being more causal of the outcome than was a target extinguished in compound with a control cue lacking inhibitory properties. In contrast, the remaining experiments showed that the extinction of a target cue was regulated by the presence, but not the causal status, of a partner cue: Target cues extinguished in compound were protected from extinction, and no evidence showed that an already extinguished partner conferred more protection (Exp. 2), or that an excitatory partner conferred any less protection (Exps. 2 and 3), or that an excitatory partner deepened the extinction of its already extinguished target. These findings are inconsistent with elemental models that rely on a common error term to explain associative changes in extinction. They are largely, but not completely, consistent with the configural model proposed by Pearce (Psychological Review, 94, 61–73, 1987), which predicts an ordering of levels of protection that was not observed.     

Benzodiazepine administration prevents the use of error-correction mechanisms during fear extinction

Three experiments examined the effect of systemic administration of the benzodiazepine midazolam on extinction and re-extinction of conditioned fear. Experiment 1 demonstrated that midazolam administration prior to extinction of a conditioned stimulus (CS) impaired that extinction when rats were subsequently tested drug free; however, extinction was spared if rats were extinguished, reconditioned, and re-extinguished under midazolam. Experiment 2 provided a replication of this effect within-subjects; rats were conditioned to two CSs (A and B), extinguished to one (A-), reconditioned to both, and then extinguished/re-extinguished to both stimuli in compound (AB-), under either vehicle or midazolam. On the drug-free test, rats given midazolam froze more to the CS that had been extinguished (B) than the one that been re-extinguished (A). The final experiment examined whether extinction under midazolam was regulated by prediction error. Rats were trained with three CSs (A, B, C) and extinguished to two (A-, C-). These stimuli then underwent additional extinction under midazolam or vehicle, with one CS now presented in compound with the non-extinguished CS (AB-, C-). Rats were then tested for fear of A relative to C. Rats given vehicle showed a deepening of extinction to A relative to C, as is predicted from error-correction models; however, rats given midazolam failed to show any such discrepancy in responding. The results are interpreted to indicate that the drug reduced prediction error during extinction by reducing fear, and rats were able to re-extinguish fear via a retrieval mechanism that is independent of prediction error.     

Comment on Barrow

The author continues his dialogue with Robin Barrow on the place of religion in public education (see pages 205 to 223 of this issue).