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Temporal and Spatial Contiguity Are Necessary for Competition Between Events

Herrera, Estibaliz; Alcalá, José A.; Tazumi, Toru; Buckley, Matthew G.; Prados, José; Urcelay, Gonzalo P.

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Authors

Estibaliz Herrera

José A. Alcalá

Toru Tazumi

Matthew G. Buckley

José Prados



Abstract

Over the last 50 years, cue competition phenomena have shaped theoretical developments in animal and human learning. However, recent failures to observe competition effects in standard conditioning procedures, as well as the lengthy and ongoing debate surrounding cue competition in the spatial learning literature, have cast doubts on the generality of these phenomena. In the present study, we manipulated temporal contiguity between simultaneously trained predictors and outcomes (Experiments 1–4), and spatial contiguity between landmarks and goals in spatial learning (Supplemental Experiments 1 and 2; Experiment 5). Across different parametric variations, we observed overshadowing when temporal and spatial contiguity were strong, but no overshadowing when contiguity was weak. Thus, across temporal and spatial domains, we observed that contiguity is necessary for competition to occur, and that competition between cues presented simultaneously during learning is absent when these cues were either spatially or temporally discontiguous from the outcome. Consequently, we advance a model in which the contiguity between events is accounted for and which explains these results and reconciles the previously contradictory findings observed in spatial learning.

Citation

Herrera, E., Alcalá, J. A., Tazumi, T., Buckley, M. G., Prados, J., & Urcelay, G. P. (2022). Temporal and Spatial Contiguity Are Necessary for Competition Between Events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(3), 321–347

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 27, 2021
Publication Date 2022-03
Deposit Date Nov 8, 2021
Publicly Available Date Mar 31, 2022
Print ISSN 0278-7393
Electronic ISSN 1939-1285
Publisher American Psychological Association
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 48
Issue 3
Pages 321–347
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/6673111
Publisher URL https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2022-51840-001.html

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