Signaling the omission of a response-contingent outcome reduces discriminative control

The effect of training a positive discriminative stimulus (S+ ) as a signal for the nonreinforcement of an instrumental response (S?) on the ability of that stimulus to evoke its original instrumental response was examined in three experiments using rats. In all three experiments, two different stimuli were established as S+s for different response-outcome relations. In Experiment 1, an S+ was less effective in controlling its original response after it had undergone training as an S? for a new response that earned the same outcome than it was after training as an S? for a response that earned a different outcome. Experiment 2 established that this effect was not mediated by Pavlovian inhibitory conditioning produced by the negative correlation between the S+ and the outcome during S? training. Simply arranging a negative correlation between S+ and the outcome whose occurrence it had previously signaled did not impair the ability of that S+ to elicit its original response. In Experiment 3, the response-evoking properties of an S+ were found to be undermined by using the S+ as a signal for the simple extinction of a new response trained with the same outcome, but not with a different outcome. These results suggest that positive discriminative stimuli use their associations with the outcomes earned in their presence to control the responses that earned those outcomes.