Forgetting of stimulus attributes: Some implications for hippocampal models of memory
- Department of Psychology, Kent State University, Kent, Ohio 44242, USA
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Historically, research on memory using animal models has focused on recall of the learned target response. For example, do subjects fail to show conditioned fear after a long retention interval or after an amnestic treatment? Do they remember (or not) to make the correct choice in a maze? These tasks have their counterparts, of course, in studies of human memory, where the focus has often been on manipulations affecting the retention of a list of items or other learned materials.
However, another class of memory phenomena has received far less attention, at least in the animal literature. We refer to the memory for the attributes of the context (background stimuli) in which the target response was acquired. It is well known that changing the training stimulus produces a decrement in responding, resulting in a stimulus generalization gradient. Similarly, a number of studies have shown that, when a test is given …
