Reasoning rats or associative animals? A common-element analysis of the effects of additive and subadditive pretraining on blocking.

Beckers, Miller, De Houwer, and Urushihara (2006) described the results of 3 blocking experiments conducted with rats. Beckers et al. concluded that the results of these experiments cannot be accounted for with existing theories of associative learning, and argued, instead, that the results were a consequence of the rats engaging in a process akin to effortful reasoning. Simulations of the Rescorla and Wagner (1972) theory of learning presented here challenge this conclusion by providing an alternative, associative, explanation for the results presented by Beckers et al.