Associative interference and nonreinforcement in human contingency learning

Abstract

This article reports three experiments comparing the impact on contingency assessment of associative cue interference (proactive, interspersed, and retroactive) and nonreinforcement (latent inhibition, partial reinforcement, and extinction). All three experiments used variants of the rapid trial streaming procedure developed by Allan and collaborators. Participants were exposed to stimulus streams and then asked how likely it was for a target cue to be accompanied (Experiment 1) or to be followed (Experiments 2 and 3) by a target outcome. Experiments 1 and 2 looked at interference and found that when the objective target cue–outcome contingency is positive, interspersed interference is more effective than either proactive or retroactive interference. Experiment 2 additionally showed that this conclusion was a function of the target cue–outcome contingency: when the number of cue–outcome pairings was low, retroactive interference was more efficient than interspersed interference. Experiment 3 examined nonreinforcement and found that the efficacies of latent inhibition, partial reinforcement, and extinction are also a function of the target cue–outcome contingency, but the pattern differed greatly from what was observed in Experiment 2. When the number of cue–outcome pairings was high, there was no difference between latent inhibition, partial reinforcement, and extinction. When the number of cue–outcome pairings was low, extinction did not lower the contingency judgement, whereas latent inhibition and partial reinforcement did.