A note on measurement of contingency between two binary variables in judgment tasks

Allan, Lorraine G.

doi:10.3758/bf03334492

Cited by 351 publications

(325 citation statements)

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“…Contingency is defined here 4 as the probability of an effect (E) given an action (A), minus the probability of E in the absence of A. This index is known as ∆p (Allan, 1980):…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feelings of control: Contingency determines experience of action

Moore

Lagnado

Deal³

et al. 2009

Cognition

168

144

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IntroductionThe evolution of human intelligence has allowed not just deeper understanding of the world, but a greater capacity to act on it. Such operant actions imply the ability to know that one is performing an action, and to represent its consequences (Dickinson & Balleine, 2000). Research on the epistemic content and conscious experience of action has identified two distinct processes underlying this ability.According to ideomotor theories (e.g. James, 1890), actions are internally represented by reference to their external consequences. On this view, making an operant action involves a prediction of the action goal, an idea supported by recent models of 3 computational motor control (Blakemore, Wolpert, & Frith, 2002;Berti et al, 2006). Alternatively, the conscious experience of operant action may be inferred from sensory evidence (Wegner, 2002). In particular, spatial and temporal correlations between thoughts, physical movement, and external events may lead to us to infer that we have caused an external event.Voluntary actions have strong effects on the subjective passage of time (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Temporal effects provide a common measure allowing the predictive and inferential contributions to experience of action to be compared directly.When a voluntary action, but not an involuntary movement, is followed by an external event, people perceive the action as shifted in time towards its effect, and the effect as shifted earlier in time towards the action that caused it (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). This 'intentional binding' involves a predictive element, because omitting the effect does not prevent the shift in perceived time of action, as long as the probability of an effect given an action is sufficiently high (Moore & Haggard, 2008). It also involves an inferential "postdictive" element, because the tone's occurrence shifts the perceived time of action, even when tone probability is low (Moore & Haggard, 2008).This suggests that the human mind builds internal models of action-effect relations, which determine the experience of action. Here, we investigate whether rules thought to govern causal learning in animals might also underlie the experience of agency in humans. Contingency is an index of the causal relation between events, and predicts patterns of operant learning in animals (Hammond, 1980). Contingency is defined here 4 as the probability of an effect (E) given an action (A), minus the probability of E in the absence of A. This index is known as ∆p (Allan, 1980):Where ∆p > 0 the effect is more probable in the presence than in the absence of action.Conversely, where ∆p < 0 the effect is less probable in the presence than in the absence ProcedureParticipants chose on each trial whether or not to press a key with their right index finger.The element of choice was included because computing ∆p requires trials with and without actions. They viewed a rotating clock hand (period 2560 ms, see Libet, Gleason, Wright, & Pearl, 1983), and used this to judge the time of their ac...

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“…Contingency is defined here 4 as the probability of an effect (E) given an action (A), minus the probability of E in the absence of A. This index is known as ∆p (Allan, 1980):…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Feelings of control: Contingency determines experience of action

Moore

Lagnado

Deal³

et al. 2009

Cognition

168

144

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“…A normative measure of the contingency between action and outcome (ΔP), describes the strength and direction of a contingent relationship in terms of the difference between the probability of the outcome occurring following an action, P(o|e) and the probability of the outcome occurring in the absence of the action (i.e., effect), P(o|~e), as shown in Figure 3 ( Allan, 1980). Judgements of control are broadly sensitive to manipulations of the statistical contingency between an action and an outcome (e.g., Baker, Murphy, Vallee-Tourangeau, 1996;Shanks, 1987;Wasserman, Elek, Chatlosh & Baker, 1993).…”

Section: Example 4: Individual Differences In Contingency Learning Anmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences are more than a gene × environment interaction: The role of learning.

Byrom

Murphy

2018

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cogniti

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Individual differences in behavior are understood generally as arising from an interaction between genes and environment, omitting a crucial component. The literature on animal and human learning suggests the need to posit principles of learning to explain our differences. One of the challenges for the advancement of the field has been to establish how general principles of learning can explain the almost infinite variation in behavior. We present a case that: 1) individual differences in behavior emerge, in part, from principles of learning; 2) associations provide a descriptive mechanism for understanding the contribution of experience to behavior; 3) learning theories explain dissociable aspects of behavior. We use four examples from the field of learning to illustrate the importance of involving psychology, and associative theory in particular, in the analysis of individual differences, these are; i) fear learning, ii) behavior directed to cues for outcomes (i.e., sign-and goaltracking), iii) stimulus learning related to attention, and iv) human causal learning. Individual Differences 3A goal of research into learning is to characterize how behavior changes with experience within and across species. Thorndike's (1898) Law of Effect was an early attempt to characterize the effect of experience on behavior. In offering a general law of how experience contributes to behavior, Thorndike was also giving an account of how an individual becomes unique.The classic example of Thorndike's method involved cats and an apparatus known as a puzzle box (Thorndike, 1898). The box was a rudimentary cage with latches and gates to afford escape. The cats' dislike of confined space provided a natural motivation to engage in behaviors that might serendipitously lead to release. Thorndike observed that the cats made many false starts but eventually made a response that enabled escape. With repeated exposure to the box, latency to escape decreased. The Law of Effect stated that behaviors preceding any form of 'satisfaction' (e.g., escape) would be reinforced and made more likely on subsequent trials. However, rather than considering this principle as limiting an animal's flexibility to learn, the law only restricts the conditions for learning. Consider that outside the lab, different humans can successfully complete a motivated goal in different ways. They may behave differently but the same Law of Effect strengthens their behaviors.The goals of this paper are to present the case for the individual differences approach to learning theory. We will argue that (1) learning mediates the influence of genes and environment on behavior and (2) there is complexity, to be explored, within models of learning that can account for diversity in learning. Specifically, we suggest that while genes and environment may contribute to the development of differences in learning, that an individual's phenotype interacts with experience and the memories of experience to further cause individual differences. As such, the study of individual diff...

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“…Conventionally, the contingency between the cue -outcome pairs over trials is defined by the DP rule (see Allan, 1980):…”

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confidence: 99%

Contingency judgements on the fly

Crump

Hannah

Allan

et al. 2007

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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The present research was conducted to establish the validity of a novel procedure for measuring human contingency judgements aimed at shortening the length of conventional procedures. Cues and outcomes were simple geometric shapes that were presented in a rapid streaming fashion, reducing the length of a block of trials from several minutes to a few seconds. We establish the reliability of the procedure by replicating two central findings in the contingency judgement literature, and we elaborate on the importance of this method for future research.

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A note on measurement of contingency between two binary variables in judgment tasks

Cited by 351 publications

References 8 publications

Feelings of control: Contingency determines experience of action

Feelings of control: Contingency determines experience of action

Individual differences are more than a gene × environment interaction: The role of learning.

Contingency judgements on the fly

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