Cubillas Carmelo P, Vadillo Miguel A, Matute Helena
Departamento de Psicología, Universidad a Distancia de Madrid Madrid, Spain.
Division of Health and Social Care Research, Department of Primary Care and Public Health Sciences, King's College LondonLondon, UK; Departamento de Psicología Básica, Universidad Autónoma de MadridMadrid, Spain.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jan 6;7:2050. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.02050. eCollection 2016.
Decades of research in extinction and interference show that contexts can play a critical role at disambiguating the meaning of cues that have been paired with different outcomes at different times. For instance, if a cue is followed by outcome 1 in the first phase of an experiment and by outcome 2 in a second phase, responses to cue tend to be consistent with outcome 2 when tested in a context similar to that of the second phase of the experiment. However, if participants are taken back to the original context of the first phase (i.e., ABA renewal) or to a completely new context (i.e., ABC or AAB renewal), their responses to tend to be more consistent with outcome 1. Although the role of physical and temporal contexts has been well studied, other factors that can also modulate the selective retrieval of information after interference have received less attention. The present series of experiments shows how changes in cue configuration can modulate responding in a similar manner. Across five experiments using a human predictive learning task, we found that adding, removing or replacing elements from a compound cue that had undergone an interference treatment gave rise to a recovery of responding akin to that observed after context changes in AAB renewal. These results are consistent with those of previous studies exploring the effect of changes of cue configuration on interference. Taken together, these studies suggest that a change in cue configuration can have the functional properties of a context change, a finding with important implications for formal models of configural learning and for classical accounts of interference and information retrieval.
数十年来关于消退和干扰的研究表明，情境在消除不同时间与不同结果配对的线索的含义歧义方面可以发挥关键作用。例如，如果在实验的第一阶段一个线索之后跟着结果1，而在第二阶段跟着结果2，那么在与实验第二阶段相似的情境中进行测试时，对该线索的反应往往与结果2一致。然而，如果参与者被带回第一阶段的原始情境（即ABA更新）或一个全新的情境（即ABC或AAB更新），他们对该线索的反应往往更与结果1一致。虽然物理和时间情境的作用已得到充分研究，但其他也能在干扰后调节信息选择性提取的因素受到的关注较少。本系列实验展示了线索配置的变化如何能以类似方式调节反应。在使用人类预测学习任务的五个实验中，我们发现，对经过干扰处理的复合线索添加、移除或替换元素会导致反应恢复，类似于在AAB更新中情境变化后观察到的情况。这些结果与之前探索线索配置变化对干扰影响的研究结果一致。综合来看，这些研究表明线索配置的变化可以具有情境变化的功能特性，这一发现对构型学习的形式模型以及干扰和信息提取的经典解释具有重要意义。
