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 &

In this paper we discuss the difference between instruction and experience induced belief construction and its resistance to conflicting evidence. Experiment 1 is a succesful replication of the renewal effect with experience induced belief acquisition. In Experiment 2, it is shown that the level of belief acquisition that is obtained through experience is also obtained through instruction. Nevertheless, the absence of a renewal effect in this experiment shows that both learning methods differ in their underlying cognitive structure.

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Procesos de inferencia y aprendizaje de relaciones causales en el condicionamiento de segundo orden