Luque David, Morís Joaquín, López Francisco J, Cobos Pedro L
School of Psychology, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, 2052, NSW, Australia.
Departamento de Psicología Básica, University of Málaga, Málaga, Spain.
Mem Cognit. 2017 Aug;45(6):916-931. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0705-4.
The effect of retroactive interference between cues predicting the same outcome (RIBC) occurs when the behavioral expression of a cue-outcome association (e.g., A→O1) is reduced due to the later acquisition of an association between a different cue and the same outcome (e.g., B→O1). In the present experimental series, we show that this effect can be modulated by knowledge concerning the structure of these cue-outcome relationships. In Experiments 1A and 1B, a pretraining phase was included to promote the expectation of either a one-to-one (OtO) or a many-to-one (MtO) cue-outcome structure during the subsequent RIBC training phases. We hypothesized that the adoption of an OtO expectation would make participants infer that the previously learned A→O1 relationship would not hold any longer after the exposure to B→O1 trials. Alternatively, the adoption of an MtO expectation would prevent participants from making such an inference. Experiment 1B included an additional condition without pretraining, to assess whether the OtO structure was expected by default. Experiment 2 included control conditions to assess the RIBC effect and induced the expectation of an OtO or MtO structure without the addition of a pretraining phase. Overall, the results suggest that participants effectively induced structural expectations regarding the cue-outcome contingencies. In turn, these expectations may have potentiated (OtO expectation) or alleviated (MtO expectation) the RIBC effect, depending on how well these expectations could accommodate the target A→O1 test association. This pattern of results poses difficulties for current explanations of the RIBC effect, since these explanations do not consider the incidence of cue-outcome structural expectations.
当预测相同结果的线索之间产生回溯干扰效应（RIBC）时，线索-结果关联（如A→O1）的行为表现会因后来习得的不同线索与相同结果之间的关联（如B→O1）而减弱。在本系列实验中，我们表明这种效应可通过有关这些线索-结果关系结构的知识进行调节。在实验1A和1B中，包含一个预训练阶段，以促进在随后的RIBC训练阶段对一对一（OtO）或多对一（MtO）线索-结果结构的预期。我们假设，采用OtO预期会使参与者推断，在接触B→O1试验后，先前习得的A→O1关系将不再成立。或者，采用MtO预期会阻止参与者做出这样的推断。实验1B包括一个无预训练的附加条件，以评估OtO结构是否默认被预期。实验2包括控制条件，以评估RIBC效应，并在不增加预训练阶段的情况下诱导对OtO或MtO结构的预期。总体而言，结果表明参与者有效地诱导了关于线索-结果意外情况的结构预期。反过来，这些预期可能增强了（OtO预期）或减轻了（MtO预期）RIBC效应，这取决于这些预期能够容纳目标A→O1测试关联的程度。这种结果模式给当前对RIBC效应的解释带来了困难，因为这些解释没有考虑线索-结果结构预期的发生率。
