CONTINGENCY LEARNING TRACKS WITH STIMULUS-RESPONSE PROPORTION: NO EVIDENCE OF MISPREDICTION COSTS — PREVIEW

Schmidt, J. R., & De Houwer, J. (in press). Contingency learning tracks with stimulus-response proportion: No evidence of misprediction costs. Experimental Psychology. We investigate the processes involved in human contingency learning using the colour-word contingency learning paradigm. In this task, participants respond to the print colour of neutral words. Each word is most often presented in one colour. Results show that participants respond faster and more accurately to words presented in their expected colour. In Experiment 1, we observed better performance for high relative to medium frequency word-colour pairs, and for medium relative to low frequency pairs. Within the medium frequency condition, it did not matter whether the word was predictive of a currently-unpresented colour, or the colour of a currently-unpresented word. We conclude that a given word facilitates each potential response proportional to how often they co-occurred. In contrast, there was no evidence for costs associated with violations of high-frequency expectancies. Experiment 2 further introduced a novel word baseline condition but also did not provide evidence for competition between retrieved responses.