Contiguity#Psychology

The Kontiguitätstheorie is a behaviorist learning theory. It was developed by Edwin Guthrie and published ( The psychology of learning ) in his book The Psychology of Learning 1935.

Guthrie assumes that a behavior is ( a movement ), which was related to a combination of stimuli repeated when these stimuli occur again. The behavior is his opinion immediately learned ( one- trial learning), repetitions do not matter, they only reinforce what they have learned through out forming habits. For learning is only after Guthrie the temporal coincidence of stimulus and response, which is called the contiguity of meaning.

Until 1966, contiguity was a fundamental principle of classical Konditionierens. Rescorla and Garcia suggested that spatial or temporal proximity of two events is not sufficient, because not any stimuli that occur with the unconditioned stimulus, the function of a conditioned stimulus are taking, but such stimuli that best predict the unconditioned stimulus. So sickness is more likely to stimuli such as smell, taste or food associated with a visual or acoustic stimuli. There the concept of contingency was developed which uses two probabilities in relation:

In this context, the concept of Prepardness stands ("Sleep" ), which plays a role mainly in the classical conditioning ( learning theory ) of fear. This concept was developed by Martin Seligman, who postulated that certain compounds of stimuli because of their evolutionary importance for survival (snake - danger, etc.) can be learned quickly and stabilier ( extinction resistant ). From a phylogenetic perspective, it is important to learn very quickly and stably to certain stimuli, such as Execute avoidance behavior.