Elemental and configural associations, the hippocampus and development

Two views of the stimulus controlling learned behavior are contrasted. On the elemental view, the organism fractionates its environment into isolatable features or elements, and experience alters how it responds by strengthening or weakening associations among the elements. On the configural view, it is the representation of the pattern or conjunction of stimulus elements acting on the organism that acquires control over behavior. This paper addresses the issue of how to describe the stimulus from a comparative / organismic perspective and argues that separate neural systems are available that support both elemental and configural associations. Normal adult rats and rats with hippocampalformation damage, and different‐aged rats and children were compared on tasks that permit a solution based only on elemental associations and tasks that only can be solved if the organism can acquire configural associations. Subjects in all comparison conditions were able to solve tasks that permit an elemental solution, but animals with hippocampal‐formation damage, preweanling rats, and children less than 55 months of age were signficantly impaired on tasks that required solving configural associations. Some implications of this data pattern are discussed.