The study looked at how training rats on one stimulus affected their learning of another stimulus in a series of experiments. They found that training on the second stimulus influenced how the rats associated the first stimulus with both the second stimulus and the response it triggered. Training on the second stimulus made the rats focus more on the response triggered by the second stimulus rather than the features of the second stimulus itself. This suggests that the order in which stimuli are presented can impact how animals learn and respond to different cues.