Temporal and spatial contiguity are necessary for competition between events.

Abstract

Over the last 50 years, cue competition phenomena have shaped theoretical developments in animal and human learning. However, recent failures to observe competition effects in standard conditioning procedures, as well as the lengthy and ongoing debate surrounding cue competition in the spatial learning literature, have cast doubts on the generality of these phenomena. In the present study, we manipulated temporal contiguity between simultaneously trained predictors and outcomes (Experiments 1–4), and spatial contiguity between landmarks and goals in spatial learning ( Supplemental Experiments 1 and 2; Experiment 5 ). Across different parametric variations, we observed overshadowing when temporal and spatial contiguity were strong, but no overshadowing when contiguity was weak. Thus, across temporal and spatial domains, we observed that contiguity is necessary for competition to occur, and that competition between cues presented simultaneously during learning is absent when these cues were either spatially or temporally discontiguous from the outcome. Consequently, we advance a model in which the contiguity between events is accounted for and which explains these results and reconciles the previously contradictory findings observed in spatial learning.

Category relevance attenuates overshadowing in human predictive learning.

“…However, we are not aware of studies exploring whether the signal length is a factor determining overshadowing in humans. In a recent experimental series from our laboratory (Herrera et al, 2022), we did not observe reduced overshadowing with longer CSs; however, this was based on a comparison across experiments, so it should not be considered as conclusive evidence for the absence of an effect of stimulus length in overshadowing.…”

“…However, all these studies mentioned above were conducted with nonhuman animals and little evidence is available on the importance of relative salience in human studies. At their best, studies using human participants have identified the specific conditions of temporal and spatial contiguity under which competition or facilitation is more likely to be observed (Alcalá, Kirkden, et al, 2023; Alcalá, Miller, et al, 2023; Glautier, 2002; Herrera et al, 2022). This advises that more research is needed to achieve a better understanding of the specific factors underpinning cue interaction phenomena in human participants.…”

The effects of goal–landmark distance on overshadowing: A replication in humans (Homo sapiens) of Goodyear and Kamil (2004).

“…Consistent with this notion, Herrera et al (2022) trained human participants in a kite-shaped virtual arena, requiring them to locate an invisible goal. The control group was trained with only boundary information (i.e., the shape of a kite), whereas the experimental groups were trained in the same environment, but in the presence of an additional source of information, a landmark (i.e., a portion of the wall was painted in a different color).…”

“…R. Miller & Matzel, 1988; Pearce & Hall, 1980; Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) have been contrasted. Across humans and other species, competition between features and boundary information has been documented in some reports (e.g., Austen & McGregor, 2014; Herrera et al, 2022) but not in others (Pearce et al, 2001; Redhead & Hamilton, 2007), and hence there is evidence in favor of both families of theories, which has led to numerous debates (e.g., Jeffery, 2010; Pearce, 2009).…”

Social overshadowing: Revisiting cue-competition in social interactions

“…Similarly, overshadowing refers to impaired learning about a cue X that was trained in compound with a cue B, compared to when trained alone (Pavlov, 1927). Blocking and overshadowing have been observed, not only in nonhuman animals, but in studies of human contingency judgment (Price & Yates, 1993;Shanks, 1985), Pavlovian conditioning (Martin & Levey, 1991), spatial learning (Herrera et al, 2022), or evaluative conditioning (Kattner & Green, 2015). All these examples suggest that cue-competition is due to domain-general mechanisms that are present in a wide range of species (Urcelay, 2017).…”