TY - JOUR

T1 - Outcome predictability biases cued search

AU - Griffiths, Oren

AU - Erlinger, May

AU - Beesley, Tom

AU - Le Pelley, Mike E.

N1 - ©American Psychological Association, 2018. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. The final article is available, upon publication, at: 10.1037/xlm0000529

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - Within the domain of associative learning, there is substantial evidence that people (and other animals) select amongst environmental cues on the basis of their reinforcement history.Specifically, people preferentially attend to, and learn about, cueing stimuli that have previously predicted events of consequence (a predictiveness bias). By contrast, relatively little is known about whether people prioritize some (to-be-predicted) outcome events over others on the basis of their past experience with those outcomes (a predictability bias). The present experiments assessed whether the prior predictability of a stimulus results in a learning bias in a contingency learning task, as such effects are not anticipated by formalmodels of associative learning. Previously unpredictable stimuli were less readily learned about than previously predictable stimuli. This pattern is unlikely to reflect the use of strategic search processes or blocking of learning by the context. Instead we argue that our findings are most consistent with the operation of a biased learning mechanism.

AB - Within the domain of associative learning, there is substantial evidence that people (and other animals) select amongst environmental cues on the basis of their reinforcement history.Specifically, people preferentially attend to, and learn about, cueing stimuli that have previously predicted events of consequence (a predictiveness bias). By contrast, relatively little is known about whether people prioritize some (to-be-predicted) outcome events over others on the basis of their past experience with those outcomes (a predictability bias). The present experiments assessed whether the prior predictability of a stimulus results in a learning bias in a contingency learning task, as such effects are not anticipated by formalmodels of associative learning. Previously unpredictable stimuli were less readily learned about than previously predictable stimuli. This pattern is unlikely to reflect the use of strategic search processes or blocking of learning by the context. Instead we argue that our findings are most consistent with the operation of a biased learning mechanism.

U2 - 10.1037/xlm0000529

DO - 10.1037/xlm0000529

M3 - Journal article

VL - 44

SP - 1215

EP - 1223

JO - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

JF - Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

SN - 0278-7393

IS - 8

ER -