The effects of age on associative and rule-based causal learning and generalization.

Abstract

We assessed how age influences associative and rule-based processes in causal learning using the Shanks and Darby (1998) concurrent patterning discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were divided into groups based on their learning performance after 6 blocks of training trials. High discrimination mastery young adults learned the patterning discrimination more rapidly and accurately than moderate mastery young adults. They were also more likely to induce the patterning rule and use this rule to generate predictions for novel cues, whereas moderate mastery young adults were more likely to use cue similarity as the basis for their predictions. Like moderate mastery young adults, older adults used similarity-based generalization for novel cues, but they did not achieve the same level of patterning discrimination. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were trained to the same learning criterion. Older adults again showed deficits in patterning discrimination and, in contrast to young adults, even when they reported awareness of the patterning rule, they used only similarity-based generalization in their predictions for novel cues. These findings suggest that it is important to consider how the ability to code or use cue representations interacts with the requirements of the causal learning task. In particular, age differences in causal learning seem to be greatest for tasks that require rapid coding of configural representations to control associative interference between similar cues. Configural coding may also be related to the success of rule-based processes in these types of learning tasks.

Dependent measure and time constraints modulate the competition between conflicting feature-based and rule-based generalization processes.

“…Shanks and Darby's (1998) task has been previously used in several studies to analyze the effect of different factors on the engagement of similarity-and rule-based learning. Some studies have focused on individual differences (Mutter & Plumlee, 2014;Wills et al, 2011b), differences between species (Maes et al, 2015), and on the effect of specific manipulations (Wills et al, 2011a). Interestingly, Wills et al (2011a) conducted two experiments to test the effect of concurrent working memory load on participants' performance in Shanks and Darby's task.…”

Altered appetitive conditioning in overweight and obese women

“…Participants received a partially variable (rather than fixed) number of trials depending on how quickly they learned the CS-US contingencies (see e.g. Bennett, Hermans, Dymond, Vervoort, & Baeyens, 2015;Mutter & Plumlee, 2014). Specifically, participants received a minimum of four trials per trial type and a maximum of fifteen (for trial sequence see below).…”

Aging and the role of attention in associative learning.

“…In support of this idea, recent work by Nassar et al (2016) has linked age-related deficits in associative learning to insufficient representation and use of uncertainty to guide learning. Further support comes from studies showing that age differences are exacerbated in learning contexts that make the resolution of uncertainty more difficult (e.g., Chasseigne et al, 2004; Eppinger, Hämmerer, & Li, 2011; Mutter & Plumlee, 2014).…”