Greater Repetition of Errors Under Performance Compared to Observation in Multiple-Choice Human Learning

1980

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

Self Cite

A total of 112 high school students from five psychology classes were given a multiplechoice verbal learning task in their regular classroom setting. For the group as a whole, the more often a particular error had been repeated on prior successive trials, the more likely it was to recur. However, only 21 (about one-fifth) of the subjects showed this stubbornerror effect, and male students were primarily responsible for it (13 of 42 males showed the effect, compared with only 8 of 70 females).

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Confirmation of the stubborn-error effect in human multiple-choice verbal learning

1980

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

Self Cite

“…The very low error score for Group C in free recall also suggests the long-term retention of the concept. Finally, the fact that even after 4 months male subjects erroneously recalled relatively more perform than observe words extends the earlier reported tendency for males to repeat higher proportions of their own (perform) responses (Marx, Witter, & Farbry, 1973).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

Verbal discrimination learning and retention as a function of task and performance or observation

Homer

1980

Bull. Psychon. Soc.

Self Cite

Learning and retention of verbal materials were compared in high school students under perform (guessing with feedback) or observe (watching the performer) conditions. The correct response was randomly determined, or the shortest word, or the word that made a short message when linked to contiguous correct words. In acquisition, subjects did better when performing, females did better than males, and the shortest word group did better than the other groups. There was a variety of interactions in the retention tests, for example, that between scoring (observing subjects either scored their paired performers' responses as right or wrong or simply observed their paired performers) and trials. A transitory inhibitory effect could be attributed to the scoring operation, thus partially confirming a result reported earlier.

“…The strong effects of recency and in particular the behavior that was shown during the last occurrence of a certain situation offers important insights that can be inspiring for interventions targeted at creating desirable or breaking undesirable habits (for an overview, see Wood and Rünger, 2016): Executing a new behavior only once should already have a strong effect on subsequent behavior in this same situation. This strong effect is well-known for piano players who often have the (deplorable) experience that a specific error which occurred for the first time (and only once) at a certain point in a piece of music then has an extremely strong tendency to repeat at the next time, and to become chronic (see Marx, 1971;Marx et al, 1973;Marx and Marx, 1980; for a review, see Koppenaal, 1960).…”

Section: Practical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Law of Recency: An Episodic Stimulus-Response Retrieval Account of Habit Acquisition

2020

A habit is a regularity in automatic responding to a specific situation. Classical learning psychology explains the emergence of habits by an extended learning history during which the response becomes associated to the situation (learning of stimulus-response associations) as a function of practice ("law of exercise") and/or reinforcement ("law of effect"). In this paper, we propose the "law of recency" as another route to habit acquisition that draws on episodic memory models of automatic response regulation. According to this account, habitual responding results from (a) storing stimulusresponse episodes in memory, and (b) retrieving these episodes when encountering the stimulus again. This leads to a reactivation of the response that was bound to the stimulus (c) even in the absence of extended practice and reinforcement. As a measure of habit formation, we used a modified color-word contingency learning (CL) paradigm, in which irrelevant stimulus features (i.e., word meaning) were predictive of the to-be-executed color categorization response. The paradigm we developed allowed us to assess effects of global CL and of an instance-based episodic response retrieval simultaneously within the same experiment. Two experiments revealed robust CL as well as episodic response retrieval effects. Importantly, these effects were not independent: Controlling for response retrieval effects eliminated effects of CL, which supports the claim that habit formation can be mediated by episodic retrieval processes, and that short-term binding effects are not fundamentally separate from long-term learning processes. Our findings have theoretical and practical implications regarding (a) models of long-term learning, and (b) the emergence and change of habitual responding.