Employability is a key concern for students and it is of increasing importance to universities with the inclusion of employability outcomes affecting performance in league tables and in the Teaching 3 Excellence Framework. Universities typically teach employability either by embedding it within a 4 course curriculum (embedded approach) or via the career services (parallel approach). This article 5 explores the ratio of United Kingdom (UK) Psychology departments adopting an embedded approach vs a parallel approach to employability and investigates how Psychology students within a parallel department engage with their careers service. A survey of 258 undergraduate psychology students finds low levels of engagement with career service events, typically less than 50% attendance, despite increases in attendance over the course of student's degree. These findings highlight how many students, in a parallel department are simply not attending events designed to help them explore their career options or assist them navigating the application process.

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When a cue reliably predicts an outcome, the associability of that cue will change. Associative theories of learning propose this change will persist even when the same cue is paired with a different outcome. These theories, however, do not extend the same privilege to an outcome; an outcome's learning history is deemed to have no bearing on subsequent new learning involving that outcome. Two experiments were conducted which sought to investigate this assumption inherent in these theories using a serial letter-prediction task. In both experiments, participants were exposed, in Stage 1, to a predictable outcome ('X') and an unpredictable outcome ('Z'). In Stage 2, participants were exposed to the same outcomes preceded by novel cues which were equally predictive of both outcomes. Both experiments revealed that participants' learning towards the previously predictable outcome was more rapid in Stage 2 than the previously unpredicted outcome. The implications of these results for theories of associative learning are discussed.

Falling at the first hurdle: Undergraduate students' readiness to navigate the graduate recruitment process.

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Medical diagnoses are often made on the basis of the presence of multiple symptoms. However, little is known about how the presence of multiple simultaneous symptoms may influence a bias in determining which symptoms are identified, in part due to a lack of an experimental analogue of this process. The current article presents a laboratory analogue of this process and explores whether over-selectivity influences the ability to identify symptoms indicative of particular illnesses. In two experiments, participants completed a diagnosis task that required them to rate the degree to which symptoms predicted illnesses, with predictor symptoms being presented either singly or in compound. In both experiments, over-selectivity was observed; one symptom of the compound received lower ratings, compared to the other element of the compound and the single predictor, while the other component received comparable ratings with the element. These findings are discussed in relation to associative accounts of over-selectivity and as a procedure to study biases in medical decision making.

Over-selectivity occurs when one element of a complex-stimulus controls behavior at the expense of other equally elements of that stimulus; a phenomenon common in populations subject to cognitive challenge. However, lack of theoretically-based analysis, may have hindered understanding and remediation of the practically-important overselectivity phenomena. Current studies examined whether associative theories applied to overshadowing, a similar phenomenon in the context of conditioning experiments, could be applied to over-selectivity effects to open theoretical analysis of over-selectivity. Three experiments investigated whether length of training impacts over-selectivity in the same way as overshadowing, which has theoretical implications for understanding that latter phenomenon. All studies employed variants of a judgment procedure in which participants had to judge the relationship between a predictor and an outcome, and the predictors were presented either on their own, or in compound with another predictor. In all studies, the elemental cue (A) was rated similarly to one of the components of the compound (B), but higher than the other component (C). The difference in the extent to which the components of the compound (B and C) were judged as predictors became smaller as levels of training increased, which is an effect that is also seen in discrimination learning studies of overselectivity. Moreover, it was apparent that as the strength of the within-compound association increased, the level of over-selectivity decreased. These results are similar to those seen for overshadowing, and are discussed with respect to the possible associative mechanisms controlling over-selectivity.

When a cue is established as a reliable predictor of an outcome (A-O1), this cue will typically block learning between an additional cue and the same outcome if both cues are subsequently trained together (AB-O1). Three experiments sought to explore whether this effect extends to outcomes in humans using the food allergist paradigm. In all three experiments an outcome facilitation effect was observed as opposed to outcome blocking. That is, prior learning about an element of an outcome compound (A-O1) appeared to facilitate learning about a novel outcome when (A-O2) these outcomes were presented together (A-O1 O2) relative to a control stimulus that first received C-O3 trials prior to C-O1 O2 trials. In Experiment 2, however, participants were also presented with an additional set of control trials, which were presented during Stage 2 only and reliably predicted the outcome compounds. At test participants displayed more learning about these additional control trials relative to the blocked outcomes, thus displaying an outcome blocking effect alongside an outcome facilitation effect. In Experiment 3 a one-trial outcome blocking procedure was employed in order to distinguish theoretical accounts of these findings. This procedure revealed an outcome facilitation effect but not an outcome blocking effect. These results can be understood in terms of an account derived from Wagner's (1981) model. The implications of these findings are discussed.