From competition to facilitation: temporal contiguity determines interactions between events in human Action-Outcome performance

Abstract

Three experiments (n=81, n=81, n=82 respectively) explored how temporal contiguity influences Action-Outcome learning, assessing whether an intervening signal competed, facilitated, or had no effect on performance and causal attribution in undergraduate participants. Across experiments, we observed competition and facilitation as a function of the temporal contiguity between Action and Outcome. When there was a strong temporal relationship between Action and Outcome, the signal competed with the action, hindering instrumental performance but not causal attribution (Experiments 1 and 3). However, with weak temporal contiguity, the same signal facilitated both instrumental performance and causal attribution (Experiments 1 and 2). Finally, the physical intensity of the signal determined the magnitude of competition. As anticipated by associative learning models, a more salient signal disrupted to a greater extent instrumental performance (Experiment 3). The current results can be accounted for by a recent adaptation of configural theory of learning (Herrera et al., 2021).