Stable Individual Differences in Occasion Setting

Abstract

Abstract. In the current investigation, we classified participants as inhibitors or non-inhibitors depending on the extent to which they showed conditioned inhibition in a context that had been used for extinction of a conditioned response. This classification enabled us to predict participant responses in a second experiment which used a different design and a different experimental task. In the second experiment a feature-negative discrimination survived reversal training of the feature to a greater extent in the non-inhibitors than in the inhibitors and this result was supported by Bayesian analyses. We propose that the fundamental distinction between inhibitors and non-inhibitors is based on a tendency to utilize first-order (direct associations) or second-order (occasion-setting) strategies when faced with ambiguous information and that this classification is a stable individual differences attribute.

Individual differences in causal structures inferred during feature negative learning

“…Notably, only a modest proportion of participants in each experiment reported a preventive causal structure, suggesting that traditional associative models (e.g., Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) do not adequately capture what the majority of participants learn during feature negative training. These experiments demonstrate, along with Glautier and Brudan (2019), that feature negative training with the typical simultaneous procedure leads to a variety of learned causal structures in humans.…”

“…In cases where the individual differences are qualitative, aggregate data may be misleading (e.g., see Lee et al, 2018). Glautier and Brudan’s (2019) study provides initial evidence that there might be stable individual differences in feature negative learning.…”

“…In particular, there might be individual differences in what participants learn about the negative feature, with only a subset of participants learning in the manner predicted by the Rescorla-Wagner model. Glautier and Brudan (2019) have recently provided evidence in support of this idea. They presented participants with feature negative training where a context served as the negative feature, and found that participants varied in the degree to which they showed transfer of inhibitory learning in a summation test.…”

“…A popular view of occasion setting is that it constitutes evidence of hierarchical control of associative behaviour, where the occasion setter is associated not with the outcome but with an association between another cue and the outcome (Bonardi et al, 2017; Fraser & Holland, 2019; see Konorski, 1948; Rescorla, 1969 for an alternative threshold view). Indeed, Glautier and Brudan (2019) attributed the difference between their inhibitor and non-inhibitor subgroups to a tendency to learn first-order (inhibition) or second-order (occasion-setting) associations. In contrast to conditioned inhibition, the defining feature of occasion-setters is that they possess second-order (modulatory) links that are independent of any direct associations with the outcome (e.g., Holland, 1984, 1989).…”

“…Critically, in our study, we used explicit self-report measures to capture individual differences rather than data-driven methods (e.g., Glautier & Brudan, 2019). We have successfully used self-report in our previous work on generalisation to identify subgroups of participants who used different learning strategies, and found that these measures were consistent with other behavioural measures (Lee et al, 2018; Lovibond, Lee, & Hayes (2020); Wong & Lovibond, 2017).…”