The second meeting of the COOL IAP Network, organised by Jan De Houwer (UGENT) was held on November 5th, 2013 at “Het Pand” in Ghent. The meeting, attended by about 40 researchers, featured updates on WP progress by the WP leaders in the morning, as well as focused research presentations and a keynote by Pr. David Shanks (UCLondon) in the afternoon. The different documents associated with the event are available for download on this page.
The full program of the meeting appears below:
09.15 Introduction by Axel Cleeremans
09:30 WP Presentations – Part I
09:30 WP7 – Cleeremans/Brass/Rossion/Haggard
Mechanisms of awareness
10:00 WP2- Beckers/DeHouwer/Cleeremans/Peigneux/Kolinsky
Mechanisms of conditioning and causal learning
10:30 WP3 – De Houwer/Cleeremans/Brass/Beckers
Mechanisms of learning via instructions
11:00 Coffee break
11:30 WP Presentations – Part II
11:30 WP4 – Dienes /Cleeremans/Beckers
Mechanisms of implicit learning
12:00 WP5 – Brass/Cleeremans/ Haggard
Mechanisms of human decision making
12:30 Lunch + Administrative meeting (Pls only ; 12:50-13:30)
13:30 WP Presentations – Part III
13:30 WP6 – Haggard & Sidarus/Cleeremans/Brass
Mechanisms of instrumental learning
14:00 WP1 – Rossion/Peigneux
Mechanisms and dynamics of learning novel visual patterns
14:30 WP8 – Kolinsky & Ana Franco/Content/Rossion & Lochy/De Houwer
Mechanisms of cultural learning
15:00 Coffee break
15:30 Individual Presentations
15:30 Gaëtan Mertens (UGent ; WP3) : Learning via instructions
16:00 Sean Hughes (UGent) : Arbitrary applicable relational responding
16:30 Keynote: David Shanks
17:20 Drink !
Keynote presentation
Don’t Bet on it! Wagering as a Measure of Awareness in Decision Making under Uncertainty
David R. Shanks and Emmanouil Konstantinidis
Can our decisions be guided by unconscious or implicit influences? According to the somatic marker hypothesis, emotion-based signals can guide our decisions in uncertain environments outside awareness. Post-decision wagering, in which participants make wagers on the outcomes of their decisions, has been recently proposed as an objective and sensitive measure of conscious content. We have employed variations of a classic decision-making paradigm, the Iowa Gambling Task, in combination with wagering in order to investigate the role played by unconscious influences. We examined the validity of post-decision wagering by comparing it with alternative measures of conscious knowledge, specifically confidence ratings and quantitative questions. Consistent with a putative role for unconscious influences, we observed a lag between choice accuracy and the onset of advantageous wagering. However, the lag was eliminated by a change in the wagering payoff matrix and by a switch from a binary wager response to either a binary or a 4-point confidence response, and wagering underestimated awareness compared to explicit quantitative questions. Our results demonstrate the insensitivity of post-decision wagering as a direct measure of conscious knowledge and challenge the claim that implicit processes influence decision-making under uncertainty.
