COMPOUND CONDITIONING IN HONEYBEES - BLOCKING TESTS OF THE INDEPENDENCE ASSUMPTION

Six experiments with color-odor compounds failed to produce convincing evidence of blocking in honeybees even when the possibility of masking by within-compound association could be discounted. The parsimonious assumption that the components of a compound stimulus gain and lose associative strength independently with reinforcement and nonreinforcement of the compounds (which the experiments were designed to challenge) remains tenable for color-odor compounds, although perhaps not for intramodal compounds.