When more is less: extending training of the blocking association following compound training attenuates the blocking effect.

Three conditioned lick suppression experiments with rats were performed to assess the influence, following compound training of two stimuli (A and X) with the same outcome (AX-O trials), of extending training of the blocking association (i.e., A-O) on responding to the target stimulus (X) at test. In Experiment 1, backward blocking was attenuated when the blocking association was extensively trained. Experiment 2 showed that forward blocking was also attenuated by extensive further training of the blocking association following the AX-O trials. Experiment 3 contrasted candidate explanations of the results of Experiments 1 and 2 and demonstrated that these results are consistent with the framework of the extended comparator hypothesis (Denniston, Savastano, & Miller, 2001).