REMINDER-INDUCED ATTENUATION OF THE EFFECT OF RELATIVE STIMULUS VALIDITY

The roles of deficient acquisition and deficient expression of learned information in the effect of relative stimulus validity were examined using rats in a conditioned lick suppression paradigm. Recovery from the effect without further pairings of the conditioned stimulus (CS) a nd the unconditioned stimulus (US) mould favor an interpretation of th e relative validity effect Teased on a latent CS-US association as dis tinct: from a failure to acquire the: CS-US association. As a potentia l recovery manipulation, ''reminder'' treatments, consisting of the US alone (Experiment 1) or the CS alone (Experiment 2), were administere d following relative validity training. in both cases, subjects for wh ich the CS target was of low relative predictive validity exhibited en hanced responding relative to appropriate controls. Additionally, Expe riment 2 showed that the amelioration of the relative validity deficit was stimulus specific. Thus, the results of these experiments support previous suggestions that the performance deficit resulting from low relative stimulus validity is due, at least in part, to a failure to e xpress acquired information (Cole, Barnet, & Miller, 1995a). This conc lusion is discussed as a part of the larger issue of acquisition versu s performance failures.