Incidental covariation learning leading to strategy change

Abstract

As they approach a traffic light, drivers and pedestrians monitor the color (instructed stimulus feature) and/or the position of the signal (covarying stimulus feature) for response selection. Many studies have pointed out that instructions can effectively determine the stimulus features used for response selection in a task. This leaves open whether and how practice with a correlating alternative stimulus feature can lead to a strategy change from an instructed to a learned variant of performing the task. To address this question, we instructed participants to respond to the position of a stimulus within a reference frame, at the same time, during task performance, an unmentioned second stimulus feature, the color, covaried with stimulus position and allowed the use of an alternative response strategy. To assess the impact of the non-instructed stimulus feature of color on response selection throughout practice, the spatial position of the stimulus was ambiguous on some trials. Group average increases in color usage were based on a mixture of (1) participants who, despite extended practice on the covariation, exclusively relied on the instructed stimulus feature and (2) those who abruptly started to rely heavily on stimulus color to select responses in ambiguous trials. When the instructed and uninstructed feature predicted different actions, choices were still biased by the uninstructed color feature, albeit more weakly. A second experiment showed that the influence of color generalized across frequently and infrequently presented combinations of position and color. Strategy changes were accompanied by awareness in both experiments. The results suggest that incidental covariation learning can trigger spontaneous voluntary strategy change involving a re-configuration of the instructed task set.

Spontaneous discovery of novel task solutions in children

“…Because the distribution of switch time-points limits the number of trials before and after the switch for which data from all participants is available, we considered a time-window ranging from 3 half-blocks before to 4 half-blocks after the switch. As can be seen from Fig 2H , strategy discovery was abrupt, as in [ 32 , 33 , 36 ]. Pairwise tests in young adults between adjacent blocks showed no evidence of change in color use before or after the switch, while the switch itself was characterized by a marked change ( p = .02 for the comparison -1 to +1 versus p s >.2 for all other comparisons, corrected, see Fig 2H ).…”

“…Experiment 1 tested children and young adults with the Spontaneous Strategy Switch Task, which assesses the ability to discover and implement a novel strategy [ 32 , 33 ]. Participants were instructed to perform a simple decision making task that required responding to the spatial location of a stimulus (four possible locations) with two different buttons.…”

Effects of Spatial Speech Presentation on Listener Response Strategy for Talker-Identification

“…The first analysis affirmed behavioral responses at lateral loudspeaker locations to be drastically slower for TI in the spatial_id mode than for talker-localization in the spatial_loc mode (see large deviations between circle-and diamond-shaped points for spatial_id and spatial_loc modes at lateral locations in Figure 5). Therefore, faster behavioral responses at lateral locations (relative to the central location) during the spatial_id mode could not be explained by a spontaneous, full strategy change from voice recognition to sound source localization over the course of a spatial block (Allen et al, 2008;Gaschler et al, 2019). Rather, TI based on voice recognition remained the primary response strategy, but was somehow improved by the additional spatial auditory information.…”

“…Participants in the present study were not informed in advance about different talker locations or unique lateral location-talker mappings, nor did they receive any feedback on the correctness of their behavioral responses (Kidd et al, 2005a;Best et al, 2018). In spite of this, they would very likely acquire explicit or implicit knowledge about these regularities over the course of the experiment due to incidental statistical/covariation learning (Schuck et al, 2015;Gaschler et al, 2019): It was predicted that within and across spatial blocks participants would utilize talker location cues more and more often, leading to gradually faster behavioral responses at lateral locations.…”

Flexible decision-strategy improvements in children

“…Experiment 1 tested children and young adults with the Spontaneous Strategy Switch Task, which assesses the ability to discover and implement a novel strategy (Schuck et al, 2015;Gaschler, Schuck, Reverberi, Frensch, & Wenke, 2019). Participants were instructed to perform a simple decision making task that required responding to the spatial location of a stimulus with two different buttons.…”