Study title

Three experiments explored whether weakening temporal contiguity between auditory cues and an aversive outcome attenuated cue competition in an avoidance learning task with human participants. Overall, with strong temporal contiguity between auditory cues and the outcome during training (the offset of the predictive auditory signals concurred with the onset of the outcome), the target cue trained as part of a compound yielded less avoidance behaviour than the control cue trained alone, an instance of overshadowing. However, weakening temporal contiguity during training (inserting a 5-s trace) attenuated overshadowing, resulting in similar avoidance behaviour in response to the control and target cues. These results provide evidence that, as predicted by a recent modification of Pearce’s configural theory, temporal contiguity is critical for determining cue competition.In any domain of daily life and cognition, humans solve tasks and make decisions by using information that comes from multiple, different sources. It is quite obvious that we learn from previous experiences. We then use multiple sources of information to guide our behaviour in environments, make decisions about what is beneficial for us, and act in social situations (attributions, imitation). Most times however, not all information in the environment is useful. For example, if we eat fish and chips and later become ill, it is difficult to know which of the two made us ill, and people tend to select one or the other based on quantity. In fact, humans are particularly adept at selecting and learning from those sources which provide information about relevant outcomes. Hence, the idea of competition between different sources of information has been prominent in theories of learning. A wealth of data in the social sciences and psychology supports this assertion. Yet, the finding that multiple sources of information compete during learning is not ubiquitous. In some fields (i.e., spatial learning,...