Deconstructing the law of effect

Gallistel, C. R.

doi:10.1016/j.geb.2004.06.012

Cited by 32 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(25 reference statements)

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“…Maximizing has been observed in the literature on strategy change in skill acquisition (e.g., Touron and Hertzog, 2004; Gaschler and Frensch, 2007, 2009) where people tend to exclusively choose the one of two processing strategies that is the most suitable on most of the trials. This however, might be an exception as in many other task contexts probability matching has proven to be a robust phenomenon (see, e.g., Gallistel, 2005, for a discussion). He suggested that probability matching is a “hard-wired” policy which is useful in dynamic environments as it guarantees continuous sampling of the options so that an agent does not run the risk of missing to notice changes in which options are currently more or less rewarding.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to Gallistel (2005) expectations have a causal role in human behavior in many economic theories and are the driving force of fast adaptation in animals to changed reinforcement schedules. The concept of expectation is discussed under various labels such as anticipation (e.g., Kunde et al, 2007), expectancy (e.g., Perruchet et al, 2006), and prediction (e.g., Sutton and Barto, 1981).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does Explicit Expectation Really Affect Preparation?

et al. 2012

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Expectation enables preparation for an upcoming event and supports performance if the anticipated situation occurs, as manifested in behavioral effects (e.g., decreased RT). However, demonstrating coincidence between expectation and preparation is not sufficient for attributing a causal role to the former. The content of explicit expectation may simply reflect the present preparation state. We targeted this issue by experimentally teasing apart demands for preparation and explicit expectations. Expectations often originate from our experience: we expect that events occurring with a high frequency in the past are more likely to occur again. In addition to expectation, other task demands can feed into action preparation. In four experiments, frequency-based expectation was pitted against a selective response deadline. In a three-choice reaction time task, participants responded to stimuli that appeared with varying frequency (60, 30, 10%). Trial-by-trial stimulus expectations were either captured via verbal predictions or induced by visual cues. Predictions as well as response times quickly conformed to the variation in stimulus frequency. After two (of five) experimental blocks we forced participants by selective time pressure to respond faster to a less frequent stimulus. Therefore, participants had to prepare for one stimulus (medium frequency) while often explicitly expecting a different one (high frequency). Response times for the less frequent stimulus decreased immediately, while explicit expectations continued to indicate the (unchanged) presentation frequencies. Explicit expectations were thus not just reflecting preparation. In fact, participants responded faster when the stimulus matched the trial-wise expectations, even when task demands discouraged their use. In conclusion, we argue that explicit expectation feeds into preparatory processes instead of being a mere by-product.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does Explicit Expectation Really Affect Preparation?

et al. 2012

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“…The authors argued that the differences in the training phases resulted from local reactive adaptation rather than changes in expectations, because top-down operating expectation effects should transfer to the test phase. However, as self-generated verbalized expectations have been shown to quickly adapt to the probability of different stimuli , proactive control might also have led to a quick adaptation to the altered distribution of event frequencies in the Duthoo study (see also Gallistel, 2005).…”

Section: Conflict Adaptation When There Is No Time For Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Probability matching has been attributed to mechanisms as diverse as (a) voluntary search for sequential structure in the material of the experiment (even if there is none, cf. Gaissmaier and Schooler, 2008) to (b) simple innate policies (e.g., Gallistel, 2005). Probability matching, in any case, guarantees continuous sampling of the options so that an agent does not run the risk of missing to notice changes in outcome probabilities.…”

Section: The Distinction Between Self-generated and Cue-induced Expecmentioning

confidence: 99%

Expectation mismatch: Differences between self-generated and cue-induced expectations

Gaschler

Schwager

Umbach

et al. 2014

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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“…This leads many to propose that probability matching is the result of an implicit habit-learning mechanism that accumulates information about the probabilistic structure of the environment (e.g., Graybiel, 1995). One important characteristic of this kind of habit learning is that information is acquired gradually across many trials, and seems to be independent of declarative memory as amnesic patients were found to perform normally in a probabilistic classiWcation task (Knowlton, Squire, & Gluck, 1994; but see Gallistel, 2005). However, for non-amnesic human subjects, it is diYcult to determine whether this kind of probabilistic classiWcation is independent of the use of declarative memory.…”

Section: Probability Learning and Probabilistic Classiwcationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Solving the credit assignment problem: explicit and implicit learning of action sequences with probabilistic outcomes

Anderson

2007

Psychological Research

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In most problem-solving activities, feedback is received at the end of an action sequence. This creates a credit-assignment problem where the learner must associate the feedback with earlier actions, and the interdependencies of actions require the learner to remember past choices of actions. In two studies, we investigated the nature of explicit and implicit learning processes in the credit-assignment problem using a probabilistic sequential choice task with and without a secondary memory task. We found that when explicit learning was dominant, learning was faster to select the better option in their first choices than in the last choices. When implicit reinforcement learning was dominant, learning was faster to select the better option in their last choices than in their first choices. Consistent with the probability-learning and sequence-learning literature, the results show that credit assignment involves two processes: an explicit memory encoding process that requires memory rehearsal and an implicit reinforcement-learning process that propagates credits backwards to previous choices.

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Deconstructing the law of effect

Cited by 32 publications

References 17 publications

Does Explicit Expectation Really Affect Preparation?

Does Explicit Expectation Really Affect Preparation?

Expectation mismatch: Differences between self-generated and cue-induced expectations

Solving the credit assignment problem: explicit and implicit learning of action sequences with probabilistic outcomes

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