Contiguity and overshadowing interactions in the rapid-streaming procedure
Description
Previous research has reported that temporal contiguity is a critical factor determining the direction of cue-interactions: strong contiguity leads to competition (e.g., overshadowing), but weak contiguity leads to no-interaction and sometimes leads to facilitation (e.g., potentiation). In these experiments, we adapted the streamed-trial procedure to further explore this interaction in a preparation in which the presentation of trials occurred in rapid streams. In five experiments we assessed whether contiguity and overshadowing effects are reliably observed in this procedure, and whether there was an interaction between them. Participants had to learn the relationship between visual cues and an outcome. Using within-subject designs, participants experienced independent series of streams in which cues and outcomes were trained either with delay or trace conditioning, and these target cues were presented either alone or with another cue. Across experiments, we consistently observed overshadowing (Experiments 1, 2, 5) and contiguity effects (Experiments 2, 3, 4, 5). Despite the consistency of both effects, we did not find that weakening temporal contiguity abolished competition between cues, although the magnitude of overshadowing was weaker with trace conditioning. This suggests that in the streamed-trial procedure contiguity modulates competition to some extent, but perhaps the parameters and conditions used in here were not adequate to produce a shift from competition to facilitation. Overall, these results suggest that the extent to which contiguity determines cue-interactions depends on multiple variables that we address in the General Discussion.
External URI
Subjects
- Conditioned response
- Perception
- Behaviorism (Psychology)
- temporal contiguity, overshadowing, rapid trial streaming
- Biological Sciences::Psychology
- B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion::BF Psychology
Divisions
- University of Nottingham, UK Campus::Faculty of Science::School of Psychology
Deposit date
2022-04-29Data type
Behavioural data (judgments of relatedness)Contributors
- Alcalá, José A.
Funders
- Economic & Social Research Council
Grant number
- ES/R011494/2
Data collection method
The data was collected whilst participants participated in the experiments (online). The experiment was programmed using Gorilla and deployed online (MTurk) for data collection.Resource languages
- en