Sometimes we are rewarded for responding quickly; other times for responding slowly. The important common factor in these and other cases is frustration - how we learn about it and how we respond to it. Without our awareness, our long-term dispositions are shaped from infancy and early childhood by such inconsistency of reward and by our reactions to discrepancy, and they are marked by changes in arousal, suppression, persistance and regression. This book provides a basis in learning theory, and particularly in frustration theory, for the comprehension not only of the mechanisms controlling...

R.E. Lubow offers a complete survey of the basic data that comprise the latent inhibition effect, and a review of theories that attempt to explain it. He then elaborates on his own Conditioned Attention Theory and derives applications for learned helplessness and schizophrenia. Latent inhibition is an exquisitely simple, robust, and pervasive behavioral phenomenon--the reduced ability of an organism to learn new associations to previously inconsequential stimuli. It has been demonstrated in a variety of animals, including humans, across many different learning tasks. The ease of demonstrating...