Department of Psychology, Philipps-Universität Marburg, Marburg, Germany.
School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
PLoS One. 2020 Dec 18;15(12):e0243434. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0243434. eCollection 2020.
In recent years, several studies of human predictive learning demonstrated better learning about outcomes that have previously been experienced as consistently predictable compared to outcomes previously experienced as less predictable, namely the outcome predictability effect. As this effect may have wide-reaching implications for current theories of associative learning, the present study aimed to examine the generality of the effect with a human goal-tracking paradigm, employing three different designs to manipulate the predictability of outcomes in an initial training phase. In contrast to the previous studies, learning in a subsequent phase, when every outcome was equally predictable by novel cues, was not reliably affected by the outcomes' predictability in the first phase. This lack of an outcome predictability effect provides insights into the parameters of the effect and its underlying mechanisms.
近年来，几项关于人类预测学习的研究表明，与先前经历过的不太可预测的结果相比，人们在先前经历过的一致可预测的结果方面的学习能力更好，即结果可预测性效应。由于该效应可能对当前的联想学习理论具有广泛的影响，本研究旨在使用人类目标跟踪范式来检验该效应的普遍性，该范式采用三种不同的设计来在初始训练阶段操纵结果的可预测性。与之前的研究不同，当每个结果都可以通过新线索可靠地预测时，在随后的阶段进行学习，但是第一阶段的结果可预测性不会可靠地影响学习。这种缺乏结果可预测性效应的现象为该效应的参数及其潜在机制提供了深入的了解。
