To test the relevance of the information hypothesis in the CER situation, a compound CS (S
1 overlapping S
2) was paired with shock in 4 experimental groups of rats, and suppression in water-licking rates produced by S
1 or S
2 was measured. During CS-US pairings, S
1 was occasionally presented alone for the experimental groups in which the probability that S
1 predicted the shock varied systematically from 4/4 to 1/4 from group to group. The control group (Group 0/4) received CSs and USs unpaired. Though results were not statistically significant, both informative and reliable S
1s produced more suppression than their redundant counterparts in Group 4/4. As the reliability of S
1 predicting the arrival of shock decreased, however, the S
2 produced more suppression than S
1 especially in Group 1/4. Implications of these findings to the more general problems of compound conditioning were discussed.
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