Murphy, R. A., Vallee-Tourangeau, F., Msetfi, R. M., Baker, Andy G., Wills, A. J.

2005

New directions in human associative learning.

Signal-outcome contingency, contiguity, and the depressive realism effect

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers

Published

Research into animal conditioning has proceeded to develop real-time models of association formation. However, no such development has occurred in the field of human contingency learning. It is possible of course that these variables are irrelevant for human learning. However, we already know that contingency learning in humans is sensitive to the delay between signal and outcome. One of the goals of this chapter is to look at the influence of other temporal variables. Because of the conceptual similarity between an animal acquiring a conditioned response on the basis of CS-US contingency and a human reasoner gauging the relationship between a cue and an outcome, the Rescorla-Wagner (1972) model of associative learning has been applied to human contingency learning. Similar to early animal associationists, researchers studying human contingency learning suggested that participants were simply sensitive to either the number of times that the signal and the outcome co-occur red or the rate at which the outcome occurred in the presence of the signal. The authors discuss one such study and illustrate using data from their lab how this original theoretical bias led to experiments that failed to test whether humans were sensitive to contingencies. They first discuss experimental evidence examining how people respond to contingent relationships and illustrate how associative models were crucial in distinguishing between contingency learning and learning based on simpler heuristics. The authors then discuss some experimental evidence that illustrates how varying some of the temporal variables in contingency tasks can influence learning. These results suggest that the authors need to modify their models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved) (from the chapter)

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