We explore the development of habitual responding within the colour-word contingency learning paradigm, in which participants respond to the colour of neutral words. Each word is most often presented in one colour. Learning is indicated by faster responses to the colour when the word is presented in the expected rather than in the unexpected colour. In Experiment 1, participants took part in two sessions, separated by one day. Critically, one set of words was trained across both days, and other new sets of words were introduced at various time points. Overall performance was faster on trials with overtrained words. Additionally, contingency effects were larger for overtrained words than for words introduced on Day 2. Removing the contingency had a similar impact on the learning effect for overtrained and new words. However, during a counterconditioning phase, where the words were made predictive of new colours, the previous contingency continued to influence performance for overtrained words but not for more recently introduced words. Relatedly, the new contingency was not acquired for the overtrained words. The reverse pattern was observed for recently-introduced words, with the newly-introduced contingency rapidly acquired and the influence of the old contingency quickly extinguished. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, both new and old learning effects were observed for both overtrained and recently-acquired contingencies. The net results suggest that while contingency learning effects are highly pliable during initial and subsequent learning, early-acquired contingency knowledge is maintained after removal of the contingency. Implications for models of learning are discussed.

Cognitively-oriented clinical psychologists sometimes think of conditioning as the formation of associations in memory. From this perspective, conditioning research is important because it reveals the conditions under which potentially pathogenic associations are formed and can be changed. In this paper, I point out that it is also possible and useful to think of conditioning in ways that do not refer to associations. First, based on the idea that conditioning effects are due to the formation of propositional beliefs, it is possible to appreciate that conditioning research informs us about one way of forming or revising beliefs: via the experience of events. Second, conditioning research reveals the environmental causes of behavior and behavior change and thus has merit regardless of ideas about the cognitive processes and representations that mediate conditioning. By discussing these different perspectives on conditioning as well as the way in which they are related, I hope to provide the reader with a wider appreciation of the merits of conditioning research for clinical psychology.

Various phenomena such as halo effects, spontaneous trait inferences, and evaluative conditioning have in common that assumptions about object features (e.g., whether a person is intelligent or likeable) are influenced by other object features (e.g., whether that person is attractive or co-occurs with other liked persons). Surprisingly, these phenomena have rarely been related to each other, most likely because different phenomena are described using different terms. To overcome this barrier, we put forward a conceptual framework that can be used to describe a wide range of these phenomena. After introducing the four core concepts of the framework, we illustrate how it can be applied to various phenomena. Doing so helps to reveal similarities and differences between those phenomena, thus improving communication and promoting interactions between different areas of research. Finally, we illustrate the generative power of the framework by discussing some of the new research questions that it highlights.

Overshadowing and blocking are two important findings that are frequently used to constrain models of associative learning. Overshadowing is the finding that learning about a cue (referred to as X) is reduced when that cue is always accompanied by a second cue (referred to as A) during the learning phase (AX). Blocking is the finding that after learning a stimulus-outcome relation for one stimulus (A), learning about a second stimulus (X) is reduced when the second stimulus is always accompanied by the first stimulus (AX). It remains unclear whether overshadowing and blocking result from explicit decision processes (e.g., “I know that A predicts the outcome, so I am not sure whether X does, too”), or whether cue competition is built directly into low-level association formation processes. In that vein, the present work examined whether overshadowing and/or blocking are present in an incidental learning procedure, where the predictive stimuli (words or shapes) are irrelevant to the cover task and merely correlated with the task-relevant stimulus dimension (colour). In two large online studies, we observed no evidence for overshadowing or blocking in this setup: (a) no evidence for an overshadowing cost was observed with compound (word-shape) cues relative to single cue learning conditions, and (b) contingency learning effects for blocked stimuli did not differ from those for blocking stimuli. However, when participants were given the explicit instructions to learn contingencies, evidence for blocking and overshadowing was observed. Together, these results suggest that contingencies of blocked/overshadowed stimuli are learned incidentally, but are suppressed by explicit decision processes due to knowledge of the contingencies for the blocking/overshadowing stimuli.