Effects of instructed and experienced uncertainty on attentional priority.

Previous research has demonstrated that attentional prioritization is shaped by prior experience of reward uncertainty: Attention is more likely to be captured by a stimulus associated with a variable (uncertain) reward than a stimulus that provides diagnostic information about available reward. This finding is noteworthy, because it runs counter to the principle that cognition is motivated to reduce uncertainty and hence surprise. Here we investigated whether this pattern of uncertainty-modulated attentional capture (UMAC) reflects a process of attention for learning, wherein uncertainty-related stimuli are prioritized in an attempt to learn about their true predictive status.

Instruction on the Scientific Method Provides (Some) Protection Against Illusions of Causality.

People tend to overestimate the efficacy of an ineffective treatment when they experience the treatment and its supposed outcome co-occurring frequently. This is referred to as the effect. Here, we attempted to improve the accuracy of participants' assessments of an ineffective treatment by instructing them about the scientific practice of comparing treatment effects against a relevant base-rate, i.

Uncertainty-modulated attentional capture: Outcome variance increases attentional priority.

Our prior experiences shape the way that we prioritize information from the environment for further processing, analysis, and action. We show in three experiments that this process of attentional prioritization is critically modulated by the degree of uncertainty in these previous experiences. Participants completed a visual search task in which they made a saccade to a target to earn a monetary reward.

Using unobserved causes to explain unexpected outcomes: The effect of existing causal knowledge on protection from extinction by a hidden cause.

People often rely on the covariation between events to infer causality. However, covariation between cues and outcomes may change over time. In the associative learning literature, extinction provides a model to study updating of causal beliefs when a previously established relationship no longer holds.

Switching from Sugar- to Artificially-Sweetened Beverages: A 12-Week Trial.

Background: Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) forms the primary source of added sugar intake and can increase the risk of metabolic disease. Evidence from studies in humans and rodents also indicates that consumption of SSBs can impair performance on cognitive tests, but that removing SSB access can ameliorate these effects.

Methods: The present study used an unblinded 3-group parallel design to assess the effects of a 12-week intervention in which young healthy adults (mean age = 22.

Retardation of acquisition after conditioned inhibition and latent inhibition training in human causal learning.

Inhibitory stimuli are slow to acquire excitatory properties when paired with the outcome in a retardation test. However, this pattern is also seen after simple nonreinforced exposure: latent inhibition. It is commonly assumed that retardation would be stronger for a conditioned inhibitor than for a latent inhibitor, but there is surprisingly little empirical evidence comparing the two in either animals or humans.

Inhibitory Learning with Bidirectional Outcomes: Prevention Learning or Causal Learning in the Opposite Direction?

Influential models of causal learning assume that learning about generative and preventive relationships are symmetrical to each other. That is, a preventive cue directly prevents an outcome from occurring (i.e.

Reversal of inhibition by no-modulation training but not by extinction in human causal learning.

One of the many strengths of the Rescorla and Wagner (1972) model is that it accounts for both excitatory and inhibitory learning using a single error-correction mechanism. However, it makes the counterintuitive prediction that nonreinforced presentations of an inhibitory stimulus will lead to extinction of its inhibitory properties. Zimmer-Hart and Rescorla (1974) provided the first of several animal conditioning studies that contradicted this prediction.

Inhibitory summation as a form of generalization.

Inhibitory learning after feature negative training (A+/AB-) is typically measured by combining the Feature B with a separately trained excitor (e.g., C) in a summation test.

Pseudoscientific Health Beliefs and the Perceived Frequency of Causal Relationships.

Beliefs about cause and effect, including health beliefs, are thought to be related to the frequency of the target outcome (e.g., health recovery) occurring when the putative cause is present and when it is absent (treatment administered vs.

Causal illusions in the classroom: how the distribution of student outcomes can promote false instructional beliefs.

Teachers sometimes believe in the efficacy of instructional practices that have little empirical support. These beliefs have proven difficult to efface despite strong challenges to their evidentiary basis. Teachers typically develop causal beliefs about the efficacy of instructional practices by inferring their effect on students' academic performance.

Bridging the divide between causal illusions in the laboratory and the real world: the effects of outcome density with a variable continuous outcome.

Illusory causation refers to a consistent error in human learning in which the learner develops a false belief that two unrelated events are causally associated. Laboratory studies usually demonstrate illusory causation by presenting two events-a cue (e.g.

Motivation to run measured by progressive ratio tests: Failure to support the addiction hypothesis for rats.

When laboratory rats are given repeated access to an activity wheel, the amount that they run steadily increases. This suggests an analogy with drug dependency in animals and humans, in that this is marked by both increasing intakes of the drug and increasing motivation to obtain the drug (craving). This analogy was examined by measuring motivation to obtain an opportunity to run using a progressive ratio (PR) schedule, whereby the number of lever presses required to release a brake on an activity wheel was increased progressively.