Classical Skin Conductance Response Conditioning: Effects of Random Intermittent Reinforcement

Williams, William C.; Prokasy, William F.

doi:10.1111/j.1469-8986.1977.tb02972.x

Cited by 6 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…There was no significant difference between negative and positive runs in McAndrew et al (2012), and the data reported by Williams and Prokasy (1977) went descriptively in the wrong direction (note, however, that the procedure and notably the reinforcement rate, were different). The only result clearly in line with the Perruchet Length and Type of the Preceding Run Figure 5.…”

Section: Fear Conditioningcontrasting

confidence: 55%

“…This means that, when all the condi tions are considered, there was evidence neither for the monotonic increase from the long runs of CS-alone to the long runs of CS-US that is predicted by associative strength theory, nor for the mono tonic decrease predicted by expectancy theory. McAndrew et al (2012) briefly mention in their discussion that an earlier study by Williams and Prokasy (1977) reported different results. Indeed, Williams and Prokasy concluded that the proba bility of galvanic responses in a partial reinforcement paradigm "decreases across sequences of successively reinforced trials and increased across sequences of successively nonreinforced trials" (their abstract).…”

Section: Fear Conditioningmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Dissociating conscious expectancies from automatic link formation in associative learning: A review on the so-called Perruchet effect.

Perruchet¹

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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A long-running debate in the literature on conditioning in humans focuses on the question of whether conditioned responses are the product of automatic link formation processes governed by the standard laws of simple associative learning, or the consequence of participants' inferences about the relationships between the 2 related events, E1 and E2, which would lead E1 to generate a conscious expectancy of E2. A paradigm aimed at dissociating the predictions of the 2 accounts was proposed by Perruchet (1985). In this paradigm, E2 randomly follows E1 only half of the time on average, a probability that is known to participants. When the preceding run goes from a long sequence of E1 alone to a long sequence of E1-E2 pairs, associative strength should increase, whereas conscious expectancy for E2 should decrease in keeping with the gambler's fallacy. This article reviews the studies making use of the paradigm in the classical conditioning domain, and the extension of the same logic to a few other experimental situations. Overall, overt behavior has been found to change in line with associative strength, and in opposition to conscious expectancy, attesting to an empirical dissociation of automatic and control processes within a single preparation. The paradigm, however, is endowed with a number of tricky methodological issues, which are examined each in turn. Although some of these issues call for further research, a tentative conclusion is that the effect provides evidence for automatic link formation processes, the existence of which has been recently denied in the "propositional" account of learning.

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Section: Fear Conditioningcontrasting

confidence: 55%

Section: Fear Conditioningmentioning

confidence: 94%

Dissociating conscious expectancies from automatic link formation in associative learning: A review on the so-called Perruchet effect.

Perruchet¹

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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“…Another piece of converging evidence comes from a recent electrodermal conditioning study in which a tone was followed by an aversive burst of white noise in 50% of the trials in the experimental condition but not in the control condition in which all the trials were reinforced (Perruchet, Grégoire, Aerts, & Poulin-Charronnat, 2016). Perruchet et al (2016) observed that, as in previous electrodermal conditioning studies (McAndrew, Jones, McLaren, & McLaren, 2012; Williams & Prokasy, 1977), the conditioned electrodermal responses tended to follow expectancies and conformed to the gambler fallacy rather than to the strength of the association between the two stimuli—suggesting that expectancies prevail over strength in this task. However, when the effect of the associative strength was isolated by subtracting the slope of the control participants (therefore controlling for response habituation), performance followed the linear trend predicted by variations in associative strength, as observed in all the other paradigms using the Perruchet procedure.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 70%

Saving the Perruchet effect: A role for the strength of the association in associative learning

Destrebecqz

Velde

Anton

et al. 2018

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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In a partial reinforcement schedule where a cue repeatedly predicts the occurrence of a target in consecutive trials, reaction times to the target tend to decrease in a monotonic fashion, while participants' expectancies for the target decrease at the same time. This dissociation between reaction times and expectancies-the so-called Perruchet effect-challenges the propositional view of learning, which posits that human conditioned responses result from conscious inferences about the relationships between events. However, whether the reaction time pattern reflects the strength of a putative cue-target link, or only non-associative processes, such as motor priming, remains unclear. To address this issue, we implemented the Perruchet procedure in a two-choice reaction time task and compared reaction time patterns in an Experimental condition, in which a tone systematically preceded a visual target, and in a Control condition, in which the onset of the two stimuli were uncoupled. Participants' expectancies regarding the target were recorded separately in an initial block. Reaction times decreased with the succession of identical trials in both conditions, reflecting the impact of motor priming. Importantly, reaction time slopes were steeper in the Experimental than in the Control condition, indicating an additional influence of the associative strength between the two stimuli. Interestingly, slopes were less steep for participants who showed the gambler's fallacy in the initial block. In sum, our results suggest the mutual influences of motor priming, associative strength, and expectancies on performance. They are in line with a dual-process model of learning involving both a propositional reasoning process and an automatic link-formation mechanism.

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“…At this point we have to acknowledge that there are some contradictory findings in the literature with respect to our result. Williams and Prokasy (1977) in particular looked at electrodermal conditioning and found that, far from the SCR change increasing with level while expectancy declined, both SCR change and expectancy declined with level giving a positive correlation between the two. There are many possible reasons for this discrepancy between the two sets of results, however, as they used a loud noise as the US, did not measure the SCR in anything like the same way (and when they considered measures more like ours they found no reliable effect), and their procedures (e.g., control of run length) varied a great deal from ours.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dissociating expectancy of shock and changes in skin conductance: An investigation of the Perruchet effect using an electrodermal paradigm.

McAndrew¹,

Jones²,

McLaren³

et al. 2012

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes

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Is human Pavlovian conditioning driven by a unitary, propositional system (as claimed by Mitchell, De Houwer, & Lovibond, 2009) or by dual systems; one under conscious control, symbolic in nature, and requiring effort to deploy, and the other utilizing associative processes and automatic in its operation (McLaren, Green, & Mackintosh, 1994)? Past research has suggested that for electrodermal conditioning to occur in humans, conscious awareness of the contingencies is necessary to produce conditioned responding (e.g., Hinchy, Lovibond, & Ter-Horst, 1995), as predicted by single process theories that attribute the conditioned response (CR) to conscious expectancy of the shock. In this article, the authors examined the Perruchet effect (Perruchet, 1985), using an electrodermal paradigm to determine whether there is any role for associative processes in human electrodermal conditioning. The authors attempted to replicate the basic effect, whereby expectancy of an unconditioned stimulus (US) increases over a run of nonreinforced trials while the CR to the conditional stimulus (CS) declines, and the complementary pattern in which expectancy decreases over a run of reinforced trials while the CR to the CS grows in strength. In line with these patterns, the change in skin conductance response (our CR) as a function of US run length was found to follow a linear trend opposite to that of conscious expectancy of shock with respect to US run length. This dissociation supports a dual-processing system account of human Pavlovian conditioning, with conscious, controlled processes governing expectancy (and subject to the gambler's fallacy), whereas automatic, associative processes determine at least some of the strength of the CR to the CS.

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Classical Skin Conductance Response Conditioning: Effects of Random Intermittent Reinforcement

Cited by 6 publications

References 16 publications

Dissociating conscious expectancies from automatic link formation in associative learning: A review on the so-called Perruchet effect.

Dissociating conscious expectancies from automatic link formation in associative learning: A review on the so-called Perruchet effect.

Saving the Perruchet effect: A role for the strength of the association in associative learning

Dissociating expectancy of shock and changes in skin conductance: An investigation of the Perruchet effect using an electrodermal paradigm.

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