Division of Clinical Psychology, Department of Psychology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece.
Behav Res Ther. 2009 Oct;47(10):868-75. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2009.06.016. Epub 2009 Jul 4.
This study provided controlled observations of a potential mechanism for the determination of the repetitive, aberrant perceptions or interpretations of everyday events that figure prominently in a range of psychological disorders: the adventitious reinforcement of acts of cognition by the actual consequences of concurrent motor acts. Adults made a series of two-choice brightness discriminations; on 60% of trials, choosing the brighter stimulus produced a "correct" signal while errors produced an aversive sound. On 40% of trials, the choice stimuli did not in fact differ in brightness; the consequences of responding on these "identical stimuli" trials differed across blocks of trials. Thus, on these trials perceptual judgments were directly followed by events that they did not produce. When all choices on identical stimuli trials were punished with the "error" sound, subjects showed little preference for the left-side or right-side identical stimuli, but when all choices of identical stimuli were reinforced with the "correct" light, individual preferences for the left-side or the right-side stimuli substantially increased. As the consequences of responding on identical stimuli trials were independent of the stimuli chosen, these findings provide evidence for superstitious perception, the reinforcement of perceptual acts by events that do not depend upon their occurrence.
本研究提供了对一种潜在机制的控制观察，这种机制可以解释日常生活事件的重复、异常感知或解释，这些事件在一系列心理障碍中起着重要作用：认知行为的偶然强化由并发运动行为的实际后果引起。成年人进行了一系列的两种选择亮度辨别；在 60%的试验中，选择更亮的刺激会产生“正确”信号，而错误会产生厌恶声音。在 40%的试验中，选择刺激实际上没有亮度差异；在这些“相同刺激”试验中，反应的后果在试验块之间有所不同。因此，在这些试验中，感知判断直接伴随着它们没有产生的事件。当所有相同刺激试验上的选择都因“错误”声音而受到惩罚时，被试对左侧或右侧相同刺激的偏好很小，但当所有相同刺激的选择都因“正确”光而得到强化时，对左侧或右侧刺激的个人偏好大大增加。由于相同刺激试验上的反应后果与所选择的刺激无关，这些发现为迷信感知提供了证据，即感知行为的强化是由不依赖于其发生的事件引起的。
