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 outcome density 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.e., when no treatment is delivered. The effect of these instructions was assessed in both a trial-by-trial contingency learning task, where cue administration was either decided by the participant (Experiments 1 & 2) or pre-determined by the experimenter (Experiment 3), as well as in summary format where all information was presented on a single screen (Experiment 4). Overall, we found two means by which base-rate instructions influence efficacy ratings for the ineffective treatment: 1) When information was presented sequentially, the benefit of base-rate instructions on illusory belief was mediated by reduced sampling of cue-present trials, and 2) When information was presented in summary format, we found a direct effect of base-rate instruction on reducing causal illusion. Together, these findings suggest that simple instructions on the scientific method were able to decrease participants\' (over-)weighting of cue-outcome coincidences when making causal judgements, as well as decrease their tendency to over-sample cue-present events. However, the effect of base-rate instructions on correcting illusory beliefs was incomplete, and participants still showed illusory causal judgements when the probability of the outcome occurring was high. Thus, simple textual information about assessing causal relationships is partially effective in influencing people\'s judgements of treatment efficacy, suggesting an important role of scientific instruction in debiasing cognitive errors.

The pseudocontingency framework provides a parsimonious strategy for inferring the contingency between two variables by assessing the base rates. Frequently occurring levels are associated, as are rarely occurring levels. However, this strategy can lead to different contingency inferences in different contexts, depending on how the base rates vary across contexts. Here, we examine how base-rate consistency influences base-rate learning and reliance by contrasting consistent with inconsistent base rates. We hypothesized that base-rate learning is facilitated, and that people rely more on base rates if base rates are consistent. In Experiment 1, the base rates across four contexts implied the same (consistent) or different (inconsistent) contingencies. Base rates were learned equally accurately, and participants inferred contingencies that followed the base rates but deviated from the genuine contingencies within contexts, regardless of consistency. In Experiment 2, we additionally manipulated whether the context was a plausible moderator of the contingency. While we replicated the first experiment\'s results when the context was a plausible moderator, base-rate inferences were stronger for consistent base rates when the context was an implausible moderator. Possibly, when a moderation-by-context was implausible, participants also relied on the base-rate correlation across contexts, which implied the same contingency when base rates were consistent but was zero when the base rates were inconsistent. Thus, our findings suggest that contingency inferences from base rates involve top-down processes in which people decide how to use base-rate information.

In identifying the print colors of words when some combinations of color and word occur more frequently than others, people quickly show evidence of learning these associations. This contingency learning effect is evident in faster and more accurate responses to high-contingency combinations than to low-contingency combinations. Across four experiments, we systematically varied the number of response-irrelevant word stimuli connected to response-relevant colors. In each experiment, one group experienced the typical contingency learning paradigm with three colors linked to three words; other groups saw more words (six or twelve) linked to the same three colors. All four experiments disconfirmed a central prediction derived from the Parallel Episodic Processing (PEP 2.0) model (Schmidt et al., 2016)-that the magnitude of the contingency learning effect should remain stable as more words are added to the response-irrelevant dimension, as long as the color-word contingency ratios are maintained. Responses to high-contingency items did slow down numerically as the number of words increased between groups, consistent with the prediction from PEP 2.0, but these changes were unreliable. Inconsistent with PEP 2.0, however, overall response time did not slow down and responses to low-contingency items actually sped up as the number of words increased across groups. These findings suggest that the PEP 2.0 model should be modified to incorporate response interference caused by high-probability associations when responding to low-probability combinations.

A conditioned response to a stimulus can be transferred to an associated stimulus, as seen in sensory preconditioning. In this research paper, we aimed to explore this phenomenon using a stimulus-response contingency learning paradigm using voluntary actions as responses. We conducted two preregistered experiments that explored whether a learned response can be indirectly activated by a stimulus (S1) that was never directly paired with the response itself. Importantly, S1 was previously associated with another stimulus (S2) that was then directly and contingently paired with a response (S2-R contingency). In Experiment 1a, an indirect activation of acquired stimulus-response contingencies was present for audiovisual stimulus pairs wherein the stimulus association resembled a vocabulary learning setup. This result was replicated in Experiment 1b. Additionally, we found that the effect is moderated by having conscious awareness of the S1-S2 association and the S2-R contingency. By demonstrating indirect activation effects for voluntary actions, our findings show that principles of Pavlovian conditioning like sensory preconditioning also apply to contingency learning of stimulus-response relations for operant behavior.

BACKGROUND: Many young women are dissatisfied with their bodies. This study investigated the effect on current body dissatisfaction levels of a newly developed evaluative conditioning procedure that paired self-similar and self-dissimilar images of bodies with positive and neutral affective images, respectively. We hypothesized that learning the contingency that self-similar bodies predict positive affectivity is one process that could aid in explaining how these procedures function.
METHODS: Adult women without disordered eating pathology participated in an online experiment with random assignment to an intervention or a control condition. All participants initially rated body images in self-similarity and were subsequently asked to categorize positive and neutral images by valence as quickly and accurately as possible. In the intervention condition, self-similar bodies systematically preceded positive images, and self-dissimilar images preceded neutral images, creating a similar body → positive contingency. Pairings in the control condition were unsystematic such that no contingency was present. We measured categorization latencies and accuracies to infer contingency learning as well as current body dissatisfaction immediately before and after exposure to the pairings. All participants further completed measures of trait body image concerns and disordered eating psychopathology at baseline, which we examined as moderators of an expected relation between condition assignment, contingency learning, and body dissatisfaction improvements.
RESULTS: We analyzed data from N = 173 women fulfilling the inclusion criteria. Moderated mediation analyses showed that assignment to the intervention (vs. control) condition predicted increased similar body → positive contingency learning, which in turn predicted improved body dissatisfaction post-intervention, but only among women with higher pre-existing trait body image concerns or disordered eating levels.
CONCLUSIONS: The findings point toward the relevancy of further exploring the utility of pairing procedures. Similar body → positive contingency learning predicted improved body dissatisfaction in individuals with normatively high body image concerns, which suggests pairing procedures could help inform future research on reducing body dissatisfaction.
Many people are dissatisfied with how their bodies look or how much they weigh. Body dissatisfaction can increase the risk of developing an eating disorder. This study tested a method for reducing body dissatisfaction among women. The method included pairing pictures of bodies judged as similar to one’s own body with positive pictures. For one half of the study participants, we arranged the pairings in a way that one could systematically learn that similar body pictures and positive pictures go together. Compared to the other half of study participants who were shown pairings by chance, we found that study participants indeed learned that similar body pictures and positive pictures go together. Moreover, this learning made participants who were generally dissatisfied with their bodies or who reported disordered eating symptoms more satisfied with their bodies immediately after the procedure. These findings suggest that the method could be further developed, investigated, and used in treating or preventing eating disorders.

This article reports three experiments comparing the impact on contingency assessment of associative cue interference (proactive, interspersed, and retroactive) and nonreinforcement (latent inhibition, partial reinforcement, and extinction). All three experiments used variants of the rapid trial streaming procedure developed by Allan and collaborators. Participants were exposed to stimulus streams and then asked how likely it was for a target cue to be accompanied (Experiment 1) or to be followed (Experiments 2 and 3) by a target outcome. Experiments 1 and 2 looked at interference and found that when the objective target cue-outcome contingency is positive, interspersed interference is more effective than either proactive or retroactive interference. Experiment 2 additionally showed that this conclusion was a function of the target cue-outcome contingency: when the number of cue-outcome pairings was low, retroactive interference was more efficient than interspersed interference. Experiment 3 examined nonreinforcement and found that the efficacies of latent inhibition, partial reinforcement, and extinction are also a function of the target cue-outcome contingency, but the pattern differed greatly from what was observed in Experiment 2. When the number of cue-outcome pairings was high, there was no difference between latent inhibition, partial reinforcement, and extinction. When the number of cue-outcome pairings was low, extinction did not lower the contingency judgement, whereas latent inhibition and partial reinforcement did.

Various models of the Stroop task suggest that proactive task control adaptation accounts for the modulation of task conflict in different conditions of the Stroop task, for example, when task conflict is very frequent or very infrequent. Other researchers have argued that a contingency learning of colour-word associations is the main contributor to the modulations of the Stroop effect. In this work, we constructed a design that controls for confounds that are suspected to rule out the role of control adaptation in the Stroop task. We focused on one type of conflict-task conflict and tested whether colour-naming of neutral-words (where task conflict is present) differed from colour-naming of neutral-symbols (where task conflict is not present) in four different conditions: mostly words-congruent, mostly words-incongruent, mostly words-neutral, or mostly non-words-shape. Importantly, the conditions used for the task conflict marker were identical in all four conditions. We found that the marker of task conflict (reaction time [RT] for neutral-words > RT for neutral-symbols) was significant in the mostly non-words-shape condition, where proactive task control is relaxed, but not in the mostly words conditions, where proactive task control is activated, with no difference between these three words conditions. These findings suggest that control adaptation is the main contributor to the modulations of the Stroop effect. The relevance of the results to the current literature is discussed and the results are explained in light of the proactive control-task conflict (PC-TC) model.

Several studies have challenged the conflict adaptation account of cognitive control effects, suggesting that they are the result of learning/memory processes independent from control modulation. Some authors have suggested that the item-specific proportion congruent (ISPC) effect (i.e., the smaller congruency effect on items presented frequently in an incongruent combination) is driven by colour-word contingency learning (CL). However, it has recently been suggested that CL can be explained in terms of episodic retrieval of the response given to the last encounter with the same stimulus, with no role of associative learning. This study aims to analyse the independent role of CL and episodic retrieval on the ISPC effect. Experiment 1 showed no effect of control modulation and indicated that, when manipulated independently, learning-driven contingency is modulated by the episodic factor, but it remains significant. Experiments 2 and 3 extended the study of the interplay between learning and recency to the colour-word CL paradigm, finding larger contingency effects on colour words compared with neutral ones and replicating the interaction between CL and episodic retrieval from Experiment 1. Surprisingly, these two experiments also showed control modulation apart from contingency and recency effects in colour words. In sum, our study reveals that the ISPC effect results from the joint contribution of cognitive control, associative learning, and episodic effects.

In the Stroop task, the identities of the targets (e.g., colours) and distractors (e.g., words) used are often correlated. For example, in a list in which 4 words and 4 colours are combined to form 16 stimuli, each of the 4 congruent stimuli is typically repeated 3 times as often as each of the 12 incongruent stimuli. Some accounts of the Stroop effect suggest that in this type of list, often considered as a baseline because of the matching proportion of congruent and incongruent stimuli (50%), the word dimension actually receives more attention than it does in an uncorrelated list in which words and colours are randomly paired. This increased attention would be an important determinant of the Stroop effect in correlated situations, an idea supported by the observation that higher target-distractor correlation lists are associated with larger Stroop effects. However, because target-distractor correlation tends to be confounded with congruency proportion in common designs, the latter may be the crucial factor, consistent with accounts that propose that attention is adapted to the list\'s congruency proportion. In four experiments, we examined the idea that target-distractor correlation plays a major role in colour-word Stroop experiments by contrasting an uncorrelated list with a correlated list matched on relevant variables (e.g., congruency proportion). Both null hypothesis significance testing and Bayesian analyses suggested equivalent Stroop effects in the two lists, challenging accounts based on the idea that target-distractor correlations affect how attention is allocated in the colour-word Stroop task.

It has been shown that manipulating the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials in conflict tasks (e.g., Stroop, Simon, and flanker tasks) can vary the size of conflict effects, however, by two different mechanisms. One theory is the control learning account (the brain learns the probability of conflict and uses it to proactively adjust the control demand for future trials). The other is the irrelevant stimulus-response learning account (the brain learns the probability of irrelevant stimulus-response associations and uses it to prepare responses). Previous fMRI studies have detected the brain regions that contribute to the control-learning-modulated conflict effects, but it is less known what neural substrates underlie the conflict effects modulated by irrelevant S-R learning. We here investigated this question with a model-based fMRI study, in which the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials changed dynamically in the Simon task and the models learned the probability of irrelevant S-R associations quantitatively. Behavioral analyses showed that the unsigned prediction errors (PEs) of responses generated by the learning models correlated with reaction times irrespective of congruent and incongruent trials, indicating that large unsigned PEs associated with slow responses. The fMRI results showed that the regions of fronto-parietal and cingulo-opercular network involved in cognitive control were significantly modulated by the unsigned PEs, also irrespective of congruent and incongruent trials, indicating that large unsigned PEs associated with transiently increased activity in these regions. These results together suggest that learning of irrelevant S-R associations modulates reactive control, which demonstrates a new way to modulate cognitive control compared to the control learning account.