In this article we describe some of the experimental software we have developed for the study of associative human learning and memory. All these programs have the appearance of very simple video games. Some of them use the participants ’ behavioral responses to certain stimuli during the game as a dependent variable for measuring their learning of the target cue-outcome associations. Some others explicitly ask participants to rate the degree of relationship they perceive between the cues and the outcomes. These programs are implemented in Web pages using JavaScript, which allows their use both in traditional laboratory experiments as well as in Internet-based experiments. The psychology of learning is a research area that has usually been investigated with nonhuman animals and in which, traditionally, there existed too many procedural and ethical problems to conduct experiments with humans. However, human learning is today a flourishing research area in which many interesting effects are being reported around the world (see, e.g., De Houwer &

Recent research suggests that cue competition effects in human contingency learning, such as blocking, are due to higher-order cognitive processes. Moreover, some experimental reports suggest that the effect opposite to blocking, augmentation, could occur in experimental preparations that preclude the intervention of reasoning mechanisms. In the present research, we tested this hypothesis by investigating cue interaction effects in an experimental task in which participants had to enter their responses under time pressure. The results show that under these conditions, augmentation, instead of blocking, is observed. Augmentation under time-pressure 2 For decades, studies on human contingency learning have tried to understand how people learn to predict events in their environment based on the presence or absence of cues that are associated with those events. A common finding is that a participants’ tendency to predict an outcome based on the presence of a cue that was previously paired with that outcome also depends on the experience with alternative predictors of that outcome. This principle is well illustrated by a learning effect known as blocking. In a

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh Learning in virtual environments: Some discrepancies between laboratory- and

Depressive realism consists of the lower personal control over uncontrollable events perceived by depressed as compared to nondepressed individuals. In this article, we propose that the realism of depressed individuals is caused not by an increased accuracy in perception, but by their more comprehensive exposure to the actual environmental contingencies, which in turn is due to their more passive pattern of responding. To test this hypothesis, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants were exposed to an uncontrollable task and both their probability of responding and their judgment of control were assessed. As was expected, higher levels of depression correlated negatively with probability of responding and with the illusion of control. Implications for a therapy of depression are discussed.