DAT Bootcamp Animal Behavior Practice Exam

Blocking is when prior learning prevents a new cue from forming a strong association with the outcome. If a subject has already learned that a cue predicts the outcome, introducing a new cue together with the old one doesn’t add surprise or prediction error. Since the outcome is already fully predicted by the first cue, there’s no error signal to drive learning about the new cue, so the new cue fails to acquire its own association. This highlights that learning hinges on surprise: associative strength is allocated to cues that help predict what will happen next. Once the outcome is no longer surprising, additional cues don’t gain strength. For context, acquisition is the initial formation of an association, generalization is responding to cues similar to the learned one, and extinction is the decline of the response when reinforcement stops.