McCollough Effects as Conditioned Responses: Reply to Dodwell and Humphrey

P. C. Dodwell and G. K. Humphrey (1990) criticized the Pavlovian conditioning analysis of the McCollough effect, claiming that it was conceptually flawed and that it did not assign the McCollough effect any useful function. In this article, it is suggested that the error-correction interpretation that Dodwell and Humphrey proposed as an ostensible alternative to the conditioning interpretation can be subsumed by the conditioning interpretation. Furthermore, the conditioning interpretation does ascribe a useful function to the McCollough effect.