Stimuli, Responses and State Dependence: Occasion Setting as a General Mechanism of Associative Control

Associative learning is a powerful learning mechanism that encodes the predictive relationship between stimuli (and responses) and outcomes in the environment.But sometimes the same stimulus can predict different outcomes depending on the context in which it is encountered.For example, word meaning can be conceptualized as an association between an item and its verbal label.For a bilingual person a newspaper, for example, has different labels depending on the language that is being spoken-newspaper, peridico, shimbun, and so on.Occasion setting is the mechanism that allows us to select the object's name in the language we are speaking-or more generally, the appropriate association for the current context.Leising et al. highlight many procedures in which occasion setting might play a role, and attempt to identify a set of diagnostic tests to identify it, in order to promote wider use of occasion setting.In this commentary I argue that using a less empirical, more theoretical analysis might make the concept of occasion setting accessible to an even wider audience.