Instrumental judgment and performance under variations in action-outcome contingency and contiguity

The intentional theory of instrumental performance proposes that performance of an action is determined in part by a belief about its causal effectiveness in producing a desired outcome. At variance with this notion, previous implicit learning experiments appear to have yielded dissociations between subjects' performance and beliefs. In two experiments, subjects were given an opportunity to perform an action--pressing a key on a computer keyboard--which was associated with an outcome on the computer screen according to a free-operant contingency. The subjects in one group were asked to judge the effectiveness of the action in causing the outcome, while those in a second group were asked to maximize their points score under a payoff schedule. In the first study, the effect of varying the contingency between the action and outcome was examined by keeping the probability of an outcome contiguous with an action constant and varying the probability of an outcome in the absence of an action. Performance and judgments showed a comparable sensitivity to variations of the instrumental contingency. In the second study, the delay between the action and the resultant outcome was varied. Increasing the action-outcome delay from 0 sec up to 4 sec produced a systematic decline in both causal judgments and performance relative to noncontingent, control conditions. These results are in accord with the intentional theory of performance, but they present difficulties for the notion of implicit learning.