| Sumario: | In two conditioning experiments with humans, we found that participants' prior experience exerted considerable influence on later learning of configural discrimination problems. Prior experience was manipulated by pre-training participants before the main acquisition stage. They either received a discrimination problem that encouraged an elemental solution (A+, B-, AB+, CD- in Experiment I and A+, AB+, C-, CB- in Experiment 2) or one that required a configural solution (AB+, BC-, CD+, DA- in Experiment I and A-, AB+, C+, CB- in Experiment 2). Then, all participants were shown a discrimination that required a configural solution (E+, F+, EF- in Experiment 1 and DE+, EF-, FG+, GD- in Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants who had received elemental pre-training were impaired on the later configural problem compared to participants who had received configural pre-training. The results suggest that organisms can flexibly process stimuli elementally or configurally. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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