Uengoer Metin, Lucke Sara, Lachnit Harald
Fachbereich Psychologie, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Gutenbergstraße 18, 35032, Marburg, Germany.
Learn Behav. 2018 Sep;46(3):320-326. doi: 10.3758/s13420-018-0318-1.
According to the attentional theory of context processing (ATCP), learning becomes context specific when acquired under conditions that promote attention toward contextual stimuli regardless of whether attention deployment is guided by learning experience or by other factors unrelated to learning. In one experiment with humans, we investigated whether performance in a predictive learning task can be brought under contextual control by means of a secondary task that was unrelated to predictive learning, but supposed to modulate participants' attention toward contexts. Initially, participants acquired cue-outcome relationships presented in contexts that were each composed of two elements from two dimensions. Acquisition training in the predictive learning task was combined with a one-back task that required participants to match across consecutive trials context elements belonging to one of the two dimensions. During a subsequent test, we observed that acquisition behavior in the predictive learning task was disrupted by changing the acquisition context along the dimension that was relevant for the one-back task, while there was no evidence for context specificity of predictive learning when the acquisition context was changed along the dimension that was irrelevant for the one-back task. Our results support the generality of the principles advocated by ATCP.
根据情境加工的注意理论（ATCP），当在促进对情境刺激的注意的条件下进行学习时，无论注意分配是由学习经验还是由与学习无关的其他因素引导，学习都会变得具有情境特异性。在一项针对人类的实验中，我们研究了预测性学习任务中的表现是否可以通过一项与预测性学习无关但旨在调节参与者对情境的注意的次要任务来置于情境控制之下。最初，参与者学习了在由来自两个维度的两个元素组成的情境中呈现的线索-结果关系。预测性学习任务中的习得训练与一个“回溯一项”任务相结合，该任务要求参与者在连续试验中匹配属于两个维度之一的情境元素。在随后的测试中，我们观察到，当沿着与“回溯一项”任务相关的维度改变习得情境时，预测性学习任务中的习得行为会受到干扰，而当沿着与“回溯一项”任务无关的维度改变习得情境时，没有证据表明预测性学习具有情境特异性。我们的结果支持了ATCP所倡导原则的普遍性。
