The internet as a research tool in the study of associative learning: An example from overshadowing

Abstract

The present study aimed to replicate an associative learning effect, overshadowing, both in the traditional laboratory conditions and over the internet. The experimental task required participants to predict an outcome based on the presence of several cues. When a cue that was always trained together with a second cue was presented on isolation at test, the expectancy of the outcome was impaired, which revealed overshadowing. This experimental task was performed by undergraduate students (N = 106) in the laboratory and by a different set of anonymous participants over the internet (N = 91). Similar levels of overshadowing were obtained in both locations. These similarities show that web-delivered experiments can be used as a complement of traditional experiments.

Depressive Realism: Wiser or Quieter?

“…For this reason, a replication of the basic laboratory result is the first control that we request; only after we are sure that our experiment replicates the basic laboratory effect (in the present case, the depressive realism effect) will we trust any other additional results that we may get from the Internet sample. Using this general approach, very similar results are generally being reported when the same experiment is reproduced in the laboratory and through the Internet (see, e.g., Birnbaum, 2000;Buchanan, & Smith, 1999;Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John, 2004;Kraut, Olson, Banaji, Bruckman, Cohen, & Couper, 2004;Matute, Vadillo, Vegas, & Blanco, 2007;Steyvers, Tenenbaum, Wagenmakers, & Blum, 2003;Vadillo, Bárcena, & Matute, 2006;. Therefore, and as a means of controlling for possibly noisy data in this experiment, we will check that the results replicate the basic depressive realism effect before we move on to study the effect of our target variable, the probability of responding.…”

Web-based experiment control software for research and teaching on human learning

“…Using this task we have investigated phenomena related to overshadowing (Vadillo, et al, 2006), blocking (Escobar, Pineño, & Matute, 2002), retroactive interference (Ortega & Matute, 2000;Pineño & Matute, 2000), and proactive interference (Castro, Ortega, & Matute, 2002). Other research teams have also used this task to study reasoning processes (Dieussaert, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2002).…”

“…Specifically, these tasks can be used to run experiments not only in the traditional laboratory conditions, but also over the Internet with anonymous participants from all over the world. Most importantly, they allow researchers to run an experiment simultaneously both in the laboratory and over the Internet, a strategy that is proving to be very useful in order to assess the generality of laboratory-based experiments (Vadillo, Bárcena, & Matute, 2006;Vadillo, Miller, & Matute, 2005).…”

Changes in Cue Configuration Reduce the Impact of Interfering Information in a Predictive Learning Task

“…Following our usual data selection criterion with this task (e.g., Vadillo et al, 2006), we removed from the analyses data from 14 participants (7 from each group) who by the end of each training phase responded more to a cue paired with o2 than to a cue paired with o1 . Greenhouse-Geisser corrections were applied whenever Maunchy's test revealed a violation of the sphericity assumption.…”