Temporal contiguity in associative learning: Interference and decay from an historical perspective.

Abstract

The greater the separation in time between 2 events, A followed by B, the less likely they are to become associated. The dominant explanation of this temporal contiguity effect has been trace decay: During the interval between A and B, the trace left by A becomes too weak by the time B occurs for an association to be formed between them. Pavlov adopted this idea in the context of classical conditioning and Hull used it to account for the deleterious effect of delaying reinforcement on the acquisition of instrumental responses. By 1960 various studies supported the conclusion that animals could not learn to associate 2 events separated by more than around 45 s. Research on human skill acquisition with delayed feedback and later studies using causal or predictive judgment tasks indicated that explicit cognitive processing is generally involved when humans associate events separated by more than a few seconds. The discovery of long-delay taste aversion learning prompted Revusky's (1971) alternative analysis of contiguity effects in terms of interference: The greater the separation between A and B, the more likely that extraneous events compete for association with A and B. Although the analysis of overshadowing provided by associative learning theories provides a context for this account, none of these theories provide a satisfactory account of evidence on temporal contiguity from a wide range of animal studies. Alternative timing theories are arguably also unsatisfactory.

Competition and facilitation in compound conditioning.

“…Contiguity, that is spatial and temporal closeness, is a variable that has long been known to have an effect on associative learning (see Boakes & Costa, 2014, for a recent review). Decreasing contiguity between X-O has always been observed to be detrimental when the onset asynchrony (i.e., the trace) is beyond a few hundred ms.…”

Punishment insensitivity in humans is due to failures in instrumental contingency learning

“…The failure to learn the relationships between actions and cues, and hence the aversive outcome, may be due in part to the imperfect contingency and delay between the action and CS ( Boakes and Costa, 2014 ; Frankel, 1975 ; Trenholme and Baron, 1975 ). However, such delays and imperfect contingencies are common in real life-use of punishment ( Meindl and Casey, 2012 ).…”

Punishment insensitivity in humans is due to failures in instrumental contingency learning

“…Consequently, they failed to learn the instrumental contingency between their action and that aversive outcome. This deficit in learning the relationship between their actions and the cue, and hence the aversive outcome, may be due in part to the imperfect contingency and delay between the action and the CS (Boakes & Costa, 2014; Frankel, 1975; Trenholme & Baron, 1975). However, such delays and imperfect contingencies are common in real life use of punishment (Meindl & Casey, 2012).…”