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Contingency learning as binding? Testing an exemplar view of the colour-word contingency learning effect.
James R Schmidt1, Carina G Giesen2, Klaus Rothermund2
1LEAD-CNRS UMR5022, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté (UBFC), Dijon, France.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|January 29, 2020
Summary
Contingency learning and stimulus-response binding are linked but distinct. While recent experiences significantly influence learning, a unitary memory mechanism doesn't fully explain contingency effects, suggesting additional learned regularities are involved.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Learning and Memory
Background:
- Learning contingent regularities is crucial for world interaction.
- Recent experiences heavily influence current performance, as seen in stimulus-response binding.
Purpose of the Study:
- To test if a unitary memory mechanism explains both contingency learning and stimulus-response binding.
- To investigate if contingency effects are solely explained by the summation of past event influences.
Main Methods:
- Reanalysis of datasets from the colour-word contingency learning paradigm.
- Examining the influence of accumulated binding effects across numerous previous trials.
Main Results:
- A weighted sum of binding effects explains a significant portion of the contingency effect, but not entirely.
- The contingency effect shows a robust asymptote above zero, even after accounting for past binding effects.
- Evidence suggests higher-order interactions between binding effects at different lags, not just linear accumulation.
Conclusions:
- Contingency learning involves more than just the summation of past stimulus-response binding effects.
- Learned regularities likely have an additional impact beyond episodic binding.
- Memory models need to account for these complex interactions in learning.
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