Interference between cues of the same outcome depends on the causal interpretation of the events

Abstract

In an interference-between-cues design, the expression of a learned Cue A → Outcome 1 association has been shown to be impaired if another cue, B, is separately paired with the same outcome in a second learning phase. In the present study, we assessed whether this interference effect is mediated by participants' previous causal knowledge. This was achieved by having participants learn in a diagnostic situation in Experiment 1a, and then by manipulating the causal order of the learning task in Experiments 1b and 2. If participants use their previous causal knowledge during the learning process, interference should only be observed in the diagnostic situation because only there we have a common cause (Outcome 1) of two disjoint effects, namely cues A and B. Consistent with this prediction, interference between cues was only found in Experiment 1a and in the diagnostic conditions of Experiments 1b and 2.

*The research described here was supported by research grant from Junta de Andalucı´a (HUM-0105) from Spain. David Luque has been supported by F.P.I. fellowships also from Junta de Andalucı´a (Ref.: 4381).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Julián Almaraz, Fernando Blanco, Helena Matute, and Miguel A. Vadillo for their helpful comments on the experiments presented here.

Notes

*The research described here was supported by research grant from Junta de Andalucı´a (HUM-0105) from Spain. David Luque has been supported by F.P.I. fellowships also from Junta de Andalucı´a (Ref.: 4381).

¹ We should term this effect as retroactive interference to distinguish it from the proactive interference effect. Since we will only focus on the former, the term “interference” should be interpreted, hereafter, in the narrow sense of retroactive interference.

² Here, we use the term “context” in a wide sense to refer to a constant background or cue, a discrete cue immediately preceding a training trial, or to a temporal locus.

³ Interference between cues has also been found without the use of different physical contexts or contextual cues to help participants differentiate between the two subsequent training phases (see, for example, Escobar et al., 2002). Based on this evidence, some authors have claimed that interference between cues could be explained by recency of the competing B-O1 association at the time of test (Ortega & Matute, 2000; Pineño et al., 2000). However, these results are also consistent with stating that the temporal context at the time of test, which is more similar to the temporal context of Phase 2 than to the temporal context of Phase 1, is priming the competing B-O1 over the A-O1 association.

⁴ The first block was allowed to include one more trial than the other two blocks to compensate for the greater response variability that is usually observed during the first training trials.

⁵ The same analysis on participants' responses in Experiment 1b yielded virtually the same results.