Predictive power

Predictive power
Blocking has been of special interest not just because it provides an example of the failure of the contiguity principle, but also because it seems to demonstrate the operation of another principle. Animals in the experimental condition learn well about an event with predictive power (the noise in the first stage of training predicts that the US will shortly occur), but they do not learn about an uninformative event (the added light in Phase 2 supplies no added information). The principle here is that conditioning occurs only to a CS that gives information about the likely occurrence of a succeeding event – i.e. what we might term a predictive CS.