Further evidence for the role of temporal contiguity as a determinant of overshadowing
Description
Three experiments explored whether weakening temporal contiguity between auditory cues and an outcome attenuated cue-competition in an avoidance learning task with human participants. Overall, with strong temporal contiguity between auditory cues and the outcome during training (the offset of the predictive auditory signals concurred with the onset of the outcome), the target cue trained as part of a compound yielded less avoidance behaviour than the control cue trained alone, an instance of overshadowing. However, weakening temporal contiguity during training (inserting a 5s trace) attenuated overshadowing, resulting in similar avoidance behaviour in response to the control and the target cues. Moreover, as predicted by a recent modification of Pearce’s configural theory (Pearce, 1987; see Herrera et al., 2022), temporal contiguity was critical in determining cue competition.
External URI
Subjects
- Conditioned response
- Learning, Psychology of
- Association of ideas
- Avoidance (Psychology)
- overshadowing, auditory signal, avoidance learning, configural processing, contiguity
- Biological Sciences::Psychology::Cognitive & affective psychology::Psychology of memory & learning
- B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion::BF Psychology
Divisions
- University of Nottingham, UK Campus::Faculty of Science::School of Psychology
Deposit date
2022-09-16Data type
Behavioural data (dwell time)Contributors
- Alcalá, José A.
- Ogallar, Pedro M
- Prados, Jose
Funders
- Economic & Social Research Council
Grant number
- ES/R011494/2
Data collection method
The data was collected whilst participants participated in the experiments. In each experiment, participants experienced different conditions (within and between-subjects designs). The experiment was written in C++ and data collected in person.Resource languages
- en