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To cite this Article Shanks, David R.(2007) 'Associationism and cognition: Human contingency learning at 25', The
A major topic within human learning, the field of contingency judgement, began to emerge about 25
years ago following publication of an article on depressive realism by Alloy and Abramson (1979).
Subsequently, associationism has been the dominant theoretical framework for understanding contingency learning but this has been challenged in recent years by an alternative cognitive or inferential
approach. This article outlines the key conceptual differences between these approaches and summarizes some of the main methods that have been employed to distinguish between them.
Correspondence should be addressed to David R. Shanks, Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower St.,
London WC1E 6BT, UK. E-mail: d.shanks@ucl.ac.uk
I am very grateful to the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences
Research Council for their longstanding financial support. I thank Tom Beckers, Jan De Houwer, and Helena Matute for very
helpful comments on this article. It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge colleagues with whom I have collaborated over many
years, especially Tony Dickinson, Francisco Lopez, Klaus Melchers, and Jose Perales.
# 2007 The Experimental Psychology Society
http://www.psypress.com/qjep
291
DOI:10.1080/17470210601000581
SHANKS
journals. Then in 1979 Alloy and Abramson published their famous article on contingency learning
in depression, speculating that depressed and nondepressed individuals differ in their ability to learn
contingencies between events and drawing the
counterintuitive inference, which they backed up
empirically, that depressives might actually be
better than nondepressed people at avoiding the
judgemental bias of seeing relationships between
unrelated events (see the articles by Allan, Siegel,
& Hannah, 2007, and Msetfi, Murphy, &
Simpson, 2007-this issue). Significantly, Alloy
and Abramson approached contingency learning
and the effects of depression on performance
from the perspective of contemporary animal learning theory1 and speculated (p. 476) that these
striking parallels between animals and humans in
contingency learning situations suggest that there
may be certain fundamental processes underlying
contingency learning across species. If there are
such basic processes common to animals and
humans, then other variables shown to affect
the magnitude and duration of preasymptotic
conditioning . . . in animals may be predicted
similarly to affect illusions of control in humans.
Although Alloy and Abramson (1979)
discussed Rescorla Wagner and learning theory
at length, they did not explicitly consider the
theory as a mechanism for human contingency
learning. However, their intriguing speculations
were sufficient to encourage Anthony Dickinson,
John Evenden, and myself (Dickinson, Shanks,
& Evenden, 1984) to set up an experimental task
suited to contingency learning and to apply the
Rescorla Wagner theory to the results. To investigate the possibility that Alloy and Abramson had
raisedthat experimental variables should have
similar effectswe tested what we thought at
the time (wrongly, as it turned out) was a unique
prediction of associative theoriesnamely, that
selective learning effects should be observable in
human contingency judgement. Specifically, we
sought evidence of blocking, a phenomenon
1
There had been some prior work on human contingency learning (Jenkins & Ward, 1965; Smedslund, 1963) but it was the
connection with associative theory that made Alloy and Abramsons (1979) paper so significant (and hence the reference to 25
years in the title of this article).
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Many of the advocates of the associative approach to human contingency learning have been well known as animal learning
researchers. Their concern to generalize their animal work to humans has been supplemented, perhaps, by an understandable
desire to widen their research in a climate in which funding for purely behavioural work with animals has become harder and
harder to obtain.
THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY, 2007, 60 (3)
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Of course, in casual language we might refer to a symbolic proposition such as the light predicts shock as an association, but I
am explicitly avoiding such usage. In common with the Humean tradition, I am assuming that associations have the defining properties of automatically carrying the mind from one idea to another and of being semantically transparent or contentless (Fodor, 2003).
Neither of these is true of propositions.
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4
Associative processes, of course, play a substantial role even in information-processing theories of higher cognitive functions
such as memory. To describe something as a retrieval cue for a memory representation, for instance, is to refer to an associative
mechanism, and this is quite explicit in many theories of retrieval.
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Procedural
Declarative
Cognitive
Associative
tone ! blink
tone ! airpuff
296
representations that connect an antecedent condition with a response but rather from mental representations that are themselves acts or behaviours.
On this view, the representation of an airpuff is not
distinct from the behaviour of blinking ones eye,
but instead these two things are inextricably
bound together into a single mental representation. Part of what it is to think about an
airpuff is to think about blinking. I believe that
the literature on priming leads inevitably towards
the view that concepts and behaviour are intrinsically linked and doubt that many representations
are purely symbolic (declarative) or purely behavioural (procedural).
An experiment by Bargh, Chen, and Burrows
(1996) illustrates this vividly. In that study, participants were asked to unscramble sets of words
into meaningful sentences. For some participants,
the sentences included many words associated with
old age whereas for others the words did not have
such associations. Bargh et al. then measured the
speed with which the participants walked down
the corridor to leave the building and found that
age-primed participants took longer. One does
not have a concept of age, such results imply,
that floats free from behaviour. Instead, behaviour
is part of the concept itself, and thinking about old
age makes us behave as if were old. Barsalou has
written extensively about this situated view of
concepts (e.g., Barsalou, Simmons, Barbey, &
Wilson, 2003) and has shown, for example, that
looking at pictures of appetizing foods activates
parts of the brain involved in gustation. Based on
research on perception and action planning,
Hommel and his colleagues (e.g., Hommel,
Musseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001) have likewise proposed integrated representations for
events and behaviour.
Hence the major distinction of relevance to
human learning and behaviour is between cognitive and associative representations. In the
context of causal reasoning and contingency judgement, this translates into the idea that behaviour is
sometimes based on rational, cognitive, symbolic
thought and sometimes is driven associatively. As
Gallistel and Gibbon (2001) have noted, the
strength of an association depends on many
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This dual-process view of the mind has gained many influential followers in recent years (e.g., Kahneman, 2003). The evidence
for two systems is indeed very persuasive (Osman, 2004; Shanks & St. John, 1994). Where the evidence is, in my view, much weaker
is in the claim that one of these systems is procedural, implicit, or unconscious.
6
There may appear to be a contradiction here. Earlier I argued that the use of verbal measures is important to ensure that we
remain within the realm of explicit processes, whereas I am now arguing that we should focus on intuitive judgement as associative
theory will not be able to challenge cognitive approaches in the domain of rational or reflective judgements. But intuitive judgements are invariably explicit rather than implicit (Tunney & Shanks, 2003). Intuitive judgements may be made without inference but
they are still conscious and can usually be justified.
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processing. It is well known, and entirely consistent with associative theory (Brandon, Vogel, &
Wagner, 2000; Pearce, 1994), that stimuli can
sometimes be treated as composed of independent
elements and sometimes as configural wholes.
Indeed, it is even well established that people can
be induced to code the same stimulus either elementally or configurally (Shanks, 2005a;
Williams, Sagness, & McPhee, 1994). Thus the
possibility arises that additivity pretraining has
its effect via switching the balance between
elemental and configural training. Specifically, if
it tended to induce a more elemental approach
(which, of course, would be expected after X,
Y, and YZ trials) then an enhancement
of blocking would be expected as blocking requires
treating the two cues as separate elements. Indeed,
Livesey and Boakes (2004) showed that additivity
instructions are rendered inadequate to generate
blocking if the cues are presented in a way that
strongly encourages configural processing. The
fact, however, that additivity training can
enhance blocking even when it is given after the
blocking trials (Beckers et al., 2005) is a particularly powerful piece of evidence for the inferential
account as it would seem to rule out an explanation
solely in terms of elemental/configural processing,
although there may be some contribution from
this shift.
On the other hand, experiments almost invariably obtain reliable blocking even when participants are given no reason to believe that the
outcome in the blocking trials is submaximal.
This is problematic for the inferential approach.
Suppose a participant is asked to rate Cue B after
A, AB training and believes the outcome
to be maximal. Although he or she may reason
that there is insufficient evidence on which to
base a judgement, the same applies to the control
case (e.g., CD) in which neither element is pretrained. Hence the observation of blocking under
such circumstances is unexpected on the cognitive
approach. Blocking is also observed when the
learning task is combined with a secondary task
designed to engage working memory (De
Houwer & Beckers, 2003). A hallmark of inferential processes is that they are disrupted by load on
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Retrospective revaluation
Associative theories have been challenged by a
range of other phenomena, some of which are genuinely problematic for the entire approach. Others,
in contrast, call for revisions to the theories themselves. Retrospective revaluation is a good example
of the latter. Theories such as Rescorla Wagner
propose that the outcome of a learning episode is
highly dependent upon the order in which events
are presented. Whereas blocking of a target cue,
B, is expected when it is paired with a treatment
cue, A, that has previously been paired with the
outcome (Stage 1: A; Stage 2: AB), this is
not expected when the two stages are reversed.
The reason is that in classical learning theories a
cue can only undergo a change in its associative
strength on trials in which it is present. In the
reversed design (Stage 1: AB; Stage 2: A),
B acquires associative strength during Stage 1
and retains it during Stage 2. Thus the motivation
for the earliest experiments on backward blocking
(Shanks, 1985) was the expectation that it would
not occur, that forward and backward blocking
would be of different magnitude, and that such a
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CONCLUSIONS
I have argued that associative links between
stimuli play a significant role in human learning
and judgement. Such links should not be considered as either procedural (S R) or declarative
(S S) but as inextricably combining both kinds
of representation. This explains how it is that
verbal and associative knowledge can interact
with one another: verbally and associatively activated concepts are simply the same thing. A
more interesting distinction is between associative
and cognitive theories where the former invoke the
transmission of activation or inhibition between
representations, and the latter assume some calculus for combining and manipulating semantically
interpretable symbols to yield rational inferences.
After a considerable body of research pointed to
the involvement of associative mechanisms in
human contingency learning, attention has
shifted recently to a range of cognitive or inferential processes. These inferential accounts are supported by a number of phenomena such as the
influence of outcome additivity training and maximality information on cue competition. However,
these theories need, and will doubtless receive,
much more development in coming years. At
present, they tend only to make predictions for
deterministic relationships such as those employed
in typical blocking designs. The approaches of De
Houwer, Lovibond, and their colleagues have little
to say about what is perhaps the key question in
contingency judgement researchnamely, the
function that determines the strength of a
contingency belief as a function of variations in
the probability of the outcome given the cue,
P(OjC), and the probability of the outcome in
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REFERENCES
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Allan, L. G., Siegel, S., & Tangen, J. M. (2005). A
signal detection analysis of contingency data.
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Alloy, L. B., & Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgment of
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Arcediano, F., Matute, H., Escobar, M., & Miller, R. R.
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