More learned irrelevance than perseveration errors in rule shifting in healthy subjects

Learned predictiveness effects following single-cue training in humans

“…In particular, previous experience of a cue (e.g., a tone) as being predictive or nonpredictive of an outcome event (e.g., food) will influence the rate of subsequent learning about that cue (e.g., Bennett, Wills, Oakeshott, & Mackintosh, 2000; Dopson, Esber, & Pearce, in press;Hall & Pearce, 1979, 1982 Haselgrove, Esber, Pearce, & Jones, in press;Lubow & Moore, 1959;Mackintosh & Little, 1969;Mackintosh & Turner, 1971;Wilson, Boumphrey, & Pearce, 1992; see Le Pelley, 2004, for a review). And consistent with the suggestion that a common associative-learning mechanism might underlie animal conditioning and human contingency learning (Dickinson, 2001), several recent studies have demonstrated an influence of prior predictiveness on the rate of learning about cues in human learning (e.g., Bonardi, Graham, Hall, & Mitchell, 2005;Griffiths & Le Pelley, 2009;Kruschke, 1996;Le Pelley & McLaren, 2003;Le Pelley, Schmidt-Hansen, Harris, Lunter, & Morris, 2010;Livesey & McLaren, 2007;Lochmann & Wills, 2003;Maes, Damen, & Eling, 2004). This rate of learning about the cue is often referred to as the cue's associability, or, perhaps more controversially, the attention paid to the cue.…”

“…For P cues, these pairings were blocked across training (i.e., all the pairings of a cue with one outcome were experienced before all the pairings with the other outcome), whereas for NP cues, the pairings were intermixed (such that a cue could be paired with each of the outcomes throughout Stage 1). This is clearly not a perfect control, given that the studies listed above as providing evidence for the positive transfer of alpha following multiple-cue pretraining (Bonardi et al, 2005;Griffiths & Le Pelley, 2009;Kruschke, 1996;Le Pelley & McLaren, 2003;Livesey & McLaren, 2007;Lochmann & Wills, 2003;Maes et al, 2004). Of the set of studies using humans that is not amenable to t analysis in terms of outcome-mediated associative processes, the present experiments represent, to the best of our knowledge, the first to investigate the influence of individual-cue pretraining on alpha.…”

“…Notably, recently reported studies of alpha effects in human contingency learning have established predictiveness in a pretraining phase involving multiple simultaneously presented cues, some of which were better predictors than others (e.g., Bonardi et al, 2005;Griffiths & Le Pelley, 2009;Kruschke, 1996;Le Pelley & McLaren, 2003;Livesey & McLaren, 2007;Lochmann & Wills, 2003;Maes et al, 2004). These are exactly the circumstances under which, as was argued above, we might expect the relative predictiveness mechanism of the Mackintosh model to K K PE of a Stage 2 discrimination between A and B, it would not aid Stage 2 discrimination between the NP Cues X and Y, since each of the latter cues would activate the representations of pink and orange equally during Stage 2.…”

“…A within-subjects design allows the possibility of a comparison of the relative predictiveness of cues across trials. That is, when a particular cue is presented, participants might compare the predictiveness of that cue with the predictiveness of other cues that they have experienced simultaneously presented cues (e.g., Bonardi et al, 2005;Griffiths & Le Pelley, 2009;Kruschke, 1996;Le Pelley & McLaren, 2003;Livesey & McLaren, 2007;Lochmann & Wills, 2003;Maes et al, 2004). That said, there do exist prior studies of the transfer of learning following individual cue pretraining in humans (e.g., Hall et al, 2003;Norcross, 1958;Reese, 1972; for a review, see Hall, 1991).…”

The processes underlying flexibility in childhood

“…Difficulty reactivating previously irrelevant task sets has been thought to result from negative-priming phenomena that, in turn, are often assumed to be related to active inhibition (e.g., Tipper, 2001). Yet, activation failure evidence in 3-year-olds (Chevalier & Blaye, 2008;Müller et al, 2006;Zelazo et al, 2003) and negative-priming evidence even in 18-month-olds (Amso & Johnson, 2005) whose inhibitory control is immature suggest that activation failures may instead relate to automatic phenomena (see also Maes et al, 2004). Indeed, negative priming has been proposed to result from episodic retrieval processes (Neill, 1997) or automatic inhibition (Harnishfeger, 1995).…”