Abstract
A noncontingent experience affects the subsequent detection of positive and negative contingencies between the same events. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that such preexposure can produce both an impairment in the detection of subsequent positive contingency and a facilitation of a negative one, independent of the level of contingency during the contingent phase. Experiment 3 raised difficulties for a model that assumes that associations to the context can explain this asymmetrical effect. Experiment 4 suggested that the different weights usually assigned to the different types of trials when computing the contingency between events can change as a result of a noncontingent experience with the same events. This change supports an account of the asymmetrical effect by a belief revision model based on a mechanism that updates the weights of the different trial types as a function of previous experience. More generally, the belief revision model is a statistical (i.e., nonassociative) model of learning that is capable of accounting for trial-order effects, which have long posed problems for statistical models.
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This research was supported by a DGICYT Spanish Grant PB94-0801 to A.C. and A.M. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of N. MacKintosh, A. Dickinson, D. Shanks, and especially R. Miller. We are also grateful to I. Valderrama for her help with the English version and to J. C. Perales, M. Ruz, M. L. RamÍrez, and A. Molina for their help in conducting the last two experiments. We are deeply indebted to R. Miller for his kind final editing of the manuscript.
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Maldonado, A., Catena, A., Cándido, A. et al. The belief revision model: asymmetrical effects of noncontingency on human covariation learning. Animal Learning & Behavior 27, 168–180 (1999). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199673
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03199673