Reliable Correlational Cuing While Controlling for Most-Recent-Pairing Effects

Abstract

Irrelevant aspects of the environment or irrelevant attributes of task-relevant stimuli can have important and reliable effects on behavior. When the specific values of an irrelevant attribute are correlated with different responses, a correlational-cuing effect is observed: faster and more accurate responses when the correlation is positive. Previous work has shown that this effect is not due to simple differences in how often the specific stimuli or attributes are being presented, and most explanations of the effect have stressed the clear parallels with classical associative learning. There are alternative explanations, however, that center on instances, episodes, or events, instead of associative learning. One such model posits that transient bindings between irrelevant stimulus attributes and responses (i.e., most-recent-pairings) may be responsible for the correlation-cuing effect and some recent work has found no evidence of correlational cuing when most-recent-pairings are taken into account. However, the experimental conditions that were employed previously may not have been optimized for associative learning. A new experiment that was designed to emphasize associative learning was conducted and produced reliable evidence of correlational cuing even when controlling for most-recent-pairing effects.

One Link to Link Them All

“…On the one hand, this insight is consistent with the claim that Pavlovian conditioning effects in humans require explicit awareness of pairings (e.g., De Houwer, 2009 ; Lovibond & Shanks, 2002 ; Mitchell et al, 2009 ). On the other hand, this finding contrasts with previous explanations of contingency learning as being automatic, reflecting retrieval of incidental and transient stimulus–response bindings that do not require awareness ( C. G. Giesen et al, 2020 ; Schmidt et al, 2020 ; see also Jiménez et al, 2022 ; Rothermund et al, 2022 ; Xu & Mordkoff, 2020 ). Dissociating the roles of awareness-mediated learning and learning that is due to (direct or indirect) stimulus-based retrieval processes may therefore be a promising avenue for future research.…”

Accounting for Proportion Congruency Effects in the Stroop Task in a Confounded Setup: Retrieval of Stimulus-Response Episodes Explains it All

“…That is, episodic response retrieval predicts facilitation (interference) if the retrieved response matches (conflicts with) the response that is required on the current trial (see Figure 1C ) – even if the retrieved response is infrequent in the current context – whereas the contingency learning account would predict facilitation or interference solely based on what is the more frequent response in the current context. Recent studies revealed that episodic retrieval is a better predictor of performance than contingency learning, and explains most if not all of the contingency learning effect ( Giesen et al, 2020 ; Schmidt et al, 2020 ; but see Xu & Mordkoff, 2020 ).…”

Two sources of color–word contingency learning: Episodic retrieval of stimulus–response bindings and propositional knowledge.

“…In a study by Xu and Mordkoff (2020), however, a significant CL effect was found even after controlling for episodic retrieval. This result seems to indicate that episodic retrieval alone is not sufficient to explain the overall CL effect.…”

“…In our study, we adopted some of the design features of Xu and Mordkoff (2020): First, we used a many-to-one mapping, assigning two colors to each response key, which allows us to separately control for the effects of both, episodic S-S and S-R retrieval. Second, we induced a contingency of medium strength between the irrelevant attribute and the correct color (5:1:1:1), which should produce some variance regarding the awareness of these contingencies while at the same time providing a sufficiently strong contingency effect.…”

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There is an ongoing debate about the cognitive mechanisms behind human contingency learning (CL). Although, in some studies, episodic retrieval of previous responses fully explained the observed CL effects (C. G. Giesen et al, 2020;Schmidt et al, 2020), other findings suggest that global contingencies have an additional effect on behavior (Xu & Mordkoff, 2020). In a high-powered (N = 500), preregistered study, we investigated CL effects after controlling for episodic retrieval of distractor-target (S-S) and distractorresponse (S-R) bindings.

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