Active contingency tasks, such as those used to explore judgments of control, suffer from variability in the actual values of critical variables. The authors debut a new, easily implemented procedure that restores control over these variables to the experimenter simply by telling participants when to respond, and when to withhold responding. This command-performance procedure not only restores control over critical variables such as actual contingency, it also allows response frequency to be manipulated independently of contingency or outcome frequency. This yields the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of the equivalent of a cue density effect in an active contingency task. Judgments of control are biased by response frequency outcome frequency, just as they are also biased by outcome frequency.
The present research was conducted to establish the validity of a novel procedure for measuring human contingency judgements aimed at shortening the length of conventional procedures. Cues and outcomes were simple geometric shapes that were presented in a rapid streaming fashion, reducing the length of a block of trials from several minutes to a few seconds. We establish the reliability of the procedure by replicating two central findings in the contingency judgement literature, and we elaborate on the importance of this method for future research.
The authors previously described a procedure that permits rapid, multiple within-participant evaluations of contingency assessment (the "streamed-trial" procedure, M. J. C. Crump, S. D. Hannah, L. G. Allan, & L. K. Hord, 2007). In the present experiments, they used the streamed-trial procedure, combined with the method of constant stimuli and a binary classification response, to assess the psychophysics of contingency assessment. This strategy provides a methodology for evaluating whether variations in contingency assessment reflect changes in the participant's sensitivity to the contingency or changes in the participant's response bias (or decision criterion). The sign of the contingency (positive or negative), outcome density, and imposition of an explicit payoff structure had little influence on sensitivity to contingencies but did influence the decision criterion. The authors discuss how a psychophysical analysis can provide a better understanding of findings in the literature such as mood and age effects on contingency assessment. They also discuss the relation between a psychophysical approach and an associative account of contingency assessment.
Classification "rules" in expert and everyday discourse are usually deficient by formal standards, lacking explicit decision procedures and precise terms. The authors argue that a central function of such weak rules is to focus on perceptual learning rather than to provide definitions. In 5 experiments, transfer following learning of family resemblance categories was influenced more by familiar-appearing features than by novel-appearing features equally acceptable under the rule. This occurred both when rules were induced and when rules were given at the beginning of instruction. To model this and other phenomena in categorization, features must be represented on 2 levels: informational and instantiated. These 2 feature levels are crucial to provide broad generalization while reflecting the known peculiarities of a complex world.
In one form of a contingency judgement task individuals must judge the relationship between an action and an outcome. There are reports that depressed individuals are more accurate than are non-depressed individuals in this task. In particular, nondepressed individuals are influenced by manipulations that affect the salience of the outcome, especially outcome probability. They overestimate a contingency if the probability of an outcome is high--the "outcome-density effect". In contrast, depressed individuals display little or no outcome-density effect. This apparent knack for depressives not to be misled by outcome density in their contingency judgements has been termed "depressive realism", and the absence of an outcome-density effect has led to the characterization of depressives as "sadder but wiser". We present a critical summary of the depressive realism literature and provide a novel interpretation of the phenomenon. We suggest that depressive realism may be understood from a psychophysical analysis of contingency judgements.
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