Recent debate about the reliability of psychological research has raised concerns about the prevalence of false positives in our discipline. However, false negatives can be just as concerning in areas of research that depend on finding support for the absence of an effect. This risk is particularly high in unconscious learning experiments, where researchers commonly seek to demonstrate that people can learn to perform a task in the absence of any explicit knowledge of the information that drives performance. The fact that some unconscious learning effects are typically studied with small samples and unreliable awareness measures makes false negatives especially likely. In the present article we focus on a popular unconscious learning paradigm, probabilistic cuing of visual attention, as a case study. Firstly, we show that, at the meta-analytic level, previous experiments reveal positive signs of participant awareness, although individual studies are severely underpowered to detect this. Secondly, we report the results of two empirical studies in which participants' awareness was tested with alternative and more sensitive dependent measures, both of which manifest positive evidence of awareness. We also show that, based on the predictions of a formal model of probabilistic cuing and given the reliabilities of the dependent measures collected in these experiments, any statistical test aimed at detecting a significant correlation between learning and awareness is doomed to return a non-significant result, even if at the latent level both constructs are actually related and participants' knowledge is completely explicit.

An illusion of control is said to occur when a person believes that he or she controls an outcome that is uncontrollable. Pathological gambling has often been related to an illusion of control, but the assessment of the illusion has generally used introspective methods in domain-specific (i.e., gambling) situations. The illusion of control of pathological gamblers, however, could be a more general problem, affecting other aspects of their daily life. Thus, we tested them using a standard associative learning task which is known to produce illusions of control in most people under certain conditions. The results showed that the illusion was significantly stronger in pathological gamblers than in a control undiagnosed sample. This suggests (1) that the experimental tasks used in basic associative learning research could be used to detect illusions of control in gamblers in a more indirect way, as compared to introspective and domain-specific questionnaires; and (2), that in addition to gambling-specific problems, pathological gamblers may have a higher-than-normal illusion of control in their daily life.

Backward blocking (BB) and interference between cues (IbC) are cue competition effects produced by very similar manipulations. In a standard BB design, both effects might occur simultaneously, which implies a potential problem for studying BB. In the present study with humans, the magnitude of both effects was compared using a non-causal scenario and a within-subjects design. Previous studies have made this comparison using learning tasks framed within causal scenarios. This posits a limit to generalizing their findings to non-causal learning situations because there is ample evidence showing that participants engage in causal reasoning when tasks are causally framed. The results obtained showed BB and IbC effects of the same magnitude in a noncausally-framed task. This highlights the methodological need for an IbC control in BB experiments.

Current associative theories of contingency learning assume that inhibitory learning plays a part in the interference between outcomes. However, it is unclear whether this inhibitory learning results in the inhibition of the outcome representation or whether it simply counteracts previous excitatory learning so that the outcome representation is neither activated nor inhibited. Additionally, these models tend to conceptualize inhibition as a relatively transient and cue-dependent state. However, research on retrieval-induced forgetting suggests that the inhibition of representations is a real process that can be relatively independent of the retrieval cue used to access the inhibited information. Consistent with this alternative view, we found that interference between outcomes reduces the retrievability of the target outcome even when the outcome is associated with a novel (non-inhibitory) cue. This result has important theoretical implications for associative models of interference and shows that the empirical facts and theories developed in studies of retrieval-induced forgetting might be relevant in contingency learning and vice versa.

It has been suggested that people and nonhuman animals protect their knowledge from interference by shifting attention toward the context when presented with information that contradicts their previous beliefs. Despite that suggestion, no studies have directly measured changes in attention while participants are exposed to an interference treatment. In the present experiments, we adapted a dot-probe task to track participants' attention to cues and contexts while they were completing a simple category learning task. The results support the hypothesis that interference produces a change in the allocation of attention to cues and contexts.