Being in the Know

This marks the first publication of my PhD wherein we discuss how the saliency of irrelevant cues influences learning through contingencies and the moderating role of explicit awareness leading to these contingency learning effects. The full paper was published in the Journal of Cognition in 2022. It is openly accessible and the data and analyses scripts and freely available on OSF.

Abstract

Previous studies demonstrated that contingency learning can be both (a) unaware (Schmidt et al., 2007), and (b) explained in terms of an automatic retrieval of stimulus-response bindings from the last episode in which the cue stimulus has been presented (Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020). We investigated whether learning is selective in a contingency learning paradigm in which pairs of salient and nonsalient cues that were equally predictive of responses to targets (digits) were presented simultaneously. In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 137), we found stronger contingency learning for salient compared to non-salient cues. Transient stimulus-response binding and retrieval processes did not contribute to these selective learning effects in contingency learning, which were instead driven by contingency awareness. Our findings indicate that under conditions of high saliency, contingency learning is mediated by conscious rule detection for which retrieval of transient stimulus-response bindings is irrelevant.

*Keywords: contingency learning, stimulus-response binding, episodic retrieval, saliency *

How to cite: Arunkumar, M., Rothermund, K., Kunde, W., & Giesen, C. G. (2022). Being in the Know: The Role of Awareness and Retrieval of Transient Stimulus-Response Bindings in Selective Contingency Learning. Journal of Cognition, 5(1), 36. DOI: ( http://doi.org/10.5334/joc.227)