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Related Experiment Videos

Blocking and backward blocking involve learned inattention.

J K Kruschke1, N J Blair

  • 1Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington 47405-7007, USA. kruschke@indiana.edu

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
|February 24, 2001
PubMed
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Human participants showed reduced learning about a disease diagnosis cue after it was blocked. This blocking effect, seen in both standard and backward blocking, suggests people learn to ignore irrelevant cues.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive psychology
  • Human associative learning

Background:

  • Associative learning is fundamental to cognition.
  • The blocking effect, where a predictor cue prevents learning about a second cue, is a key phenomenon.
  • Existing models like Rescorla-Wagner explain standard blocking but struggle with backward blocking.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate blocking of associative learning in a human disease diagnosis task.
  • To test whether blocking effects extend to backward blocking.
  • To evaluate existing models and propose alternative explanations for attenuated learning after blocking.

Main Methods:

  • Four experiments were conducted with human participants.
  • A disease diagnosis procedure was used to simulate cue-outcome learning.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Standard and backward blocking paradigms were employed.

    • Main Results:

    • Blocking significantly attenuated subsequent associative learning about the blocked cue.
    • This effect was observed for both standard and backward blocking procedures.
    • Attenuated learning could not be explained by models relying on lack of learning or negative value encoding.

    Conclusions:

    • Human associative learning is subject to blocking effects, even in complex tasks.
    • Existing Rescorla-Wagner based models are insufficient to explain the observed results.
    • A novel hypothesis suggests that people learn to reduce attention to blocked cues, explaining the attenuated learning.