Three Ways That Non-associative Knowledge May Affect Associative Learning Processes

Abstract

Associative learning theories offer one account of the way animals and humans assess the relationship between events and adapt their behavior according to resulting expectations. They assume knowledge about event relations is represented in associative networks, which consist of mental representations of cues and outcomes and the associative links that connect them. However, in human causal and contingency learning, many researchers have found that variance in standard learning effects is controlled by “non-associative” factors that are not easily captured by associative models. This has given rise to accounts of learning based on higher-order cognitive processes, some of which reject altogether the notion that humans learn in the manner described by associative networks. Despite the renewed focus on this debate in recent years, few efforts have been made to consider how the operations of associative networks and other cognitive operations could potentially interact in the course of learning. This paper thus explores possible ways in which non-associative knowledge may affect associative learning processes: (1) via changes to stimulus representations, (2) via changes to the translation of the associative expectation into behavior (3) via a shared source of expectation of the outcome that is sensitive to both the strength of associative retrieval and evaluation from non-associative influences.

Testing the deductive inferential account of blocking in causal learning

“…The challenge, however, for this and other accounts that focus on the assumed or learned functional form of the causal relationships is that it still fails to address the lack of association between assumed additivity and blocking observed across our experiments. The current results are, however, consistent with a hypothesis that participants will use deductive reasoning when strongly encouraged to do so, but usually (for instance, in the absence of explicit instructions or pretraining) base their causal judgments on a psychologically more intuitive decision, such as the strength to which a cue brings to mind an outcome (e.g., see Le Pelley, Griffiths, & Beesley, 2017;López, Cobos, & Caño, 2005;Thorwart & Livesey, 2017). This hybrid approach calls upon associative memory to inform inductive inferential reasoning but leaves open the possibility that judgments about cause and effect will be made on the basis of other decision processes in circumstances that encourage the use of alternative modes of reasoning.…”

Experience With a Linguistic Variant Affects the Acquisition of Its Sociolinguistic Meaning: An Alien‐Language‐Learning Experiment

“…A related question concerns whether sociolinguistic acquisition is simply a special case of broader patterns of associative learning, at least insofar as expectation violation is involved (see, e.g., Hirshman, 1988; Nixon, 2020; Thorwart & Livesey, 2016). Our study did not compare different domains of learning, but we would speculate that analogous results would be likely in a non‐linguistic task.…”

Social anxiety compared to depression better accounts for enhanced acquisition of self-reported anxiety toward faces paired with negative evaluation in a conditioning task

“…Combining these findings with past work, the results tentatively suggest that the effect of social anxiety on enhanced acquisition is not due to reactivity to the negative evaluation (Lissek et al, 2008;Pejic et al, 2013) or expectancy of negative evaluation from the conditioned stimulus. Future studies could investigate other mechanisms, for example, the salience of the conditioned stimulus (Pearce & Hall, 1980;Rescorla & Wagner, 1972), or the input of higher order cognitive processes (Thorwart & Livesey, 2016).…”