Matute and Pineño (1998a) showed evidence of interference between elementally trained cues and suggested that this effect occurs when the interfering association is more strongly activated than the target association at the time of testing. The present experiments tested directly the role of the relative activation of the associations in the effect of interference between elementally trained cues. In three human experiments we manipulated the relative activation of the interfering and target associations in three different ways: (a) introducing a retention interval between training of the interfering association and the test trial (Experiment 1); (b) training the target and the interfering associations in a single phase, instead of training them in separate phases (Experiment 2); and (c) introducing, just before testing, a novel cue which, like the retention interval used in Experiment 1, had the purpose of separating the interfering trials from the test trial (Experiment 3). All three manipulations led to an enhancement of responding to the target association at testing, suggesting that they were effective in preventing the interfering association from being the most strongly activated one at the time of testing. Taken together, these results add further

Associative learning theories assume that cue interaction and, specifically, retrospective revaluation occur only when the target cue is previously trained in compound with the to-be-revalued cue. However, there are recent demonstrations of retrospective revaluation in the absence of compound training (e.g., Matute & Pineño, 1998a, 1998b). Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to assume that cue interaction should be stronger when the cues are trained together than when they are trained apart. In two experiments with humans, we directly compared compound and elemental training of cues. The results showed that retrospective revaluation in the elemental condition can be as strong as and, sometimes, stronger than that in the compound condition. This suggests that within-compound associations are not necessary for retrospective revaluation to occur and that these effects can possibly be best understood in the framework of general interference theory. In the literature of animal conditioning and human associative learning, it is well known that if a cue, X, is consistently followed by an outcome, O (i.e., X–O), X is generally learned as a predictor of the occurrence of the outcome. It is also well known that responding to X in a subsequent test phase becomes altered if another cue, A, is trained in compound with X as a predictor of the same outcome. Some classic instances of these cue interaction effects in the animal learning literature are overshadowing (Pavlov, 1927), blocking (Kamin, 1968), conditioned inhibition (Pavlov, 1927), and the relative stimulus validity

Several studies have shown that predictive and causal judgments vary depending on whether the question used to assess the relationship between events is presented after each piece of information or only after all the available information has been observed. This effect could be understood by assuming that in the two cases people perceive that the test question requires that different sets of evidence be taken into account. This hypothesis is tested in the present experiments through contextual manipulations that take place at the time of training and at the time of test. Our results show that people use this contextual information to infer which set of events should be considered when making their subjective assessments. The results are at odds with current theoretical approaches, but it is possible to develop mechanisms that would allow these models to account for the observed evidence. Learning to predict future events from present events is one of the most powerful adaptive tools, since it allows an organism to find the necessary resources for survival and to avoid dangerous situations. Given its importance, this kind of predictive learning was the central focus of animal behavior research throughout the twentieth century. During the last decades, predictive learning has also become important in the area of human cognition, where it has given rise to a great amount of empirical and theoretical research. The vast amount of evidence provided by this research has sometimes turned out to be quite difficult to explain by the available theoretical approaches. Many variables usually neglected by theoretical models influence the process of human learning of predictive relations among events or the way in which humans use the acquired information. Among other things, it has been shown that the probe question used to assess participants ’ judgment (Matute,

The impairment in responding to a secondly trained association because of the prior training of another (i.e., proactive interference) is a well-established effect in human and animal research, and it has been demonstrated in many paradigms. However, learning theories have been concerned with proactive interference only when the competing stimuli have been presented in compound at some moment of the training phase. In this experiment we investigated the possibility of proactive interference between elementally-trained stimuli at the acquisition and at the retrieval stages in a behavioral task with humans. After training a cue-outcome association we observed retardation in the acquisition of an association between another cue and the same outcome. Moreover, after asymptotic acquisition of the secondly trained association, impairment of retrieval of this secondly trained association was also observed. This finding of proactive interference between elementally-trained cues suggests that interference in predictive learning and other traditional interference effects could be integrated into a common framework. Interference among cues is a central topic in associative learning research. Cue interference is well represented by Kamin’s early studies (e.g., 1968) with rats, where he found that the training of two cues in compound after the isolated

this paper was to test whether renewal can be found in human beings in a situation where the context change does not affect acquisition. We used a predictive judgments preparation where fictitious medicines are presented, and the subject has to predict whether they are related to an imaginary illness. Experiment 1 was conducted with the aim of testing our acquisition and extinction procedure. Experiment 2 looked for within subjects renewal, testing whether the return to the acquisition context after receiving extinction in a different but equally familiar context would renew the predicted probability of the medicine causing the illness

Abstract not found

Retroactive interference between cues trained apart has been regarded as an effect that occurs because the target and interfering associations share a common outcome. Although this view is consistent with evidence in the verbal learning tradition (Underwood, 1966) and, more recently, in predictive learning with humans (Pineño & Matute, 2000), little research has been conducted to ascertain whether the occurrence of this effect critically depends on the target and interfering associations sharing an identical outcome. The present experiment examined, in predictive learning with humans, retroactive interference between cues trained apart as a function of the similarity of the outcome paired with the cues. Interference was found to be stronger when the cues were paired with the same outcome than when they were paired with either similar or different outcomes.