Arguments for and proposed tests of a revised S-R contiguity-reinforcement theory of human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning: some contra-cognitive claims.

One of the consequences of the cognitive paradigm shift is that human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning of responses like the GSR has been considered to be a mere epiphenomenon or index of an underlying cognitive process. The paper begins by reviewing evidence against three such reductionist, cognitive accounts, and then proposes a revision of an S-R theory of classical conditioning that was first put forward in the early sixties. The revision is designed to increase the S-R theory's testability, and this increase is demonstrated by indicating four sets of experimental arrangements where the revised S-R theory forbids certain outcomes, and does so in a way that differentiates it from other competing theories. In this way we can proceed to begin the task of determining the boundary conditions of both cognitive and non-cognitive accounts of human Pavlovian autonomic conditioning, instead of engaging in territorial struggles between those accounts, struggles whose outcome is determined by changing Zeitgeist considerations rather than evidential ones.