In psychologist Robert Rescorla's classical conditioning experiment, one group of rats experienced a tone just beforeeach of 20 shocks. A second group of rats experienced the same number of tone-shock pairings plus an additional 20shocks with no tone. Rescorla found that the rats in the first group showed a much stronger conditioned fear response than the rats in the second group. How did Rescorla explain this finding?

Question

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Rescorla's explanation for the stronger conditioned fear response in the first group of rats is that the tone was a more reliable predictor of the shock for those rats. This means that the tone consistently signaled the impending shock and allowed the rats to develop a strong association between the two stimuli. In contrast, the second group of rats also received shocks without the tone, which may have made the tone a less reliable predictor of the shock and weakened the association between the two stimuli.

In Psychologist Robert Rescorla's Classical Conditioning Experiment, One Group of Rats