Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000, Ghent, Belgium.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2012 Aug;19(4):723-8. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0255-5.
Previous research has demonstrated that contingency learning can take place in the absence of the intention to learn. For instance, in the color-word contingency learning task, each distracting word is presented most often in a given target color (e.g., "month" in red and "plate" in green), and less often in the other colors. Participants respond more quickly and accurately when the word is presented in the expected rather than an unexpected color, even though there is no reason why they would have the intention to learn the contingencies between the words and the colors. It remains to be determined, however, whether learning in such situations would benefit or suffer from adding the goal to learn contingencies. In the reported experiment, half of the participants were informed that each word was presented most often in a certain color, and they were instructed to try to learn these contingencies. The other half of the participants were not informed that contingencies would be present. The participants given the learning goal produced a larger response time contingency effect than did the control participants. In contrast to some results from other learning paradigms, these results suggest that intentional learning adds to, rather than interferes with, unintentional learning, and we propose an explanation for some of the conflicting results.
先前的研究表明，在没有学习意图的情况下也可以进行情境学习。例如，在颜色-词汇关联学习任务中，每个干扰词最常出现在给定的目标颜色中（例如，“month”在红色中，“plate”在绿色中），而在其他颜色中出现的频率较低。当单词出现在预期而不是意外的颜色中时，参与者的反应会更快、更准确，尽管他们没有理由有意学习单词和颜色之间的关联。然而，在这种情况下，学习是否会受益或受到添加学习关联的目标的影响仍有待确定。在报告的实验中，一半的参与者被告知每个单词最常出现在某个颜色中，并指示他们尝试学习这些关联。另一半参与者没有被告知关联会存在。给出学习目标的参与者比对照组参与者产生了更大的反应时关联效应。与其他学习范式的一些结果相反，这些结果表明，有意学习增加了无意学习，而不是干扰了无意学习，我们为一些相互矛盾的结果提出了解释。
