Response-outcome contingency: Behavioral and judgmental effects of appetitive and aversive outcomes with college students

In two experiments, positive, negative, and zero response-outcome contingencies were responded to and rated by college students under a free-operant procedure. In Experiment 1, outcomes were either neutral or were associated with point gain. In Experiment 2, subjects were administered different outcome treatments: neutral outcomes, outcomes associated with money gain, or outcomes associated with money loss. In both experiments, subjects' judgments of response-outcome contingency and their operant responses were each strong linear functions of ΔP, the difference between the probability of an outcome given a response and the probability of an outcome given no response. Appetitive and aversive outcomes produced opposite and symmetrical response patterns. In Experiment 1, no differences in ratings occurred with neutral or appetitive outcomes; however, in Experiment 2, more potent appetitve outcomes led to somewhat more extreme ratings than either neutral or aversive outcomes. Increasing outcome probability produced only a slight bias in ratings of noncontingent problems in Experiment 1 and no bias in Experiment 2. Contrary to predictions derived from an analysis of superstitious behavior, increasing outcome probability in noncontingent problems decreased operant responding when outcomes were appetitive and increased operant responding when outcomes were aversive. Trend analyses revealed that Δ P was superior to several other metrics in predicting subjects' estimates of contingency and the behavioral effects of contingency. Operant responding was in closer accord with matching predictions than with maximizing predictions.     

The effects of unidirectional versus bidirectional rating procedures on college students' judgments of response-outcome contingency

Studies of human contingency judgment often reveal substantial bias and inaccuracy in ratings of cause-effect relationship. This study examined the effects of different rating procedures on contingency judgment. In two experiments, college students responded to and rated a range of positive, negative, and zero contingencies presented in a free-operant format. Experiment 1 found that judgments made along a unidirectional 0 to 100 “control” scale were less sensitive to variations in contingency (especially negative ones) and were based on less sophisticated judgment strategies than judgments made along a bidirectional − 100 to + 100 “prevent-cause” scale. Experiment 2 found that informing subjects given the unidirectional scale that their responding may either cause or prevent the outcome eliminated the tendency to underestimate negative contingencies and improved the sophistication of strategy use but did not increase judgment sensitivity to the level of subjects given the bidirectional scale. Taken together, these results suggest that the bidirectional “prevent-cause” scale contributes to highly accurate and unbiased ratings of response-outcome contingency.     

Judging response-outcome relations: The role of response-outcome contingency,outcome probability,and method of information presentation

A series of four experiments investigated college students’ judgments of interevent contingency. Subjects were asked to judge the effect of a discrete response Itapping a wire) on the occurrence of a brief outcome (a radio’s buzzing). Pairings of the possible event-state combinations (response-outcome, response-no outcome, no response-outcome, no response-no outcome) were presented in a summary-table (Experiments 2 and 4), in an unbroken-time-line (Experimente 1, 2, and 4), or in a broken-time-line format (Experiment 3). Subjects judged the extent to which the response caused the outcome or prevented it from occurring. Across all methods of information presentation, judgments were a positive function of response-outcome contingency and outcome probability. In the unbroken-time-line condition, judgments of negative response-outcome contingencies were less extreme than judgments of equivalent positive contingencies. This asymmetry was smaller in the broken-time-line condition and in those conditions in which subjects were encouraged to segment an unbroken time line into discrete response outcome units. Finally, judgments of positive and negative relationships were generally symmetrical in the summary-table condition. Relative to the two time-line portrayals, summary table judgments were also less influenced by the overall probability of outcome occurrence. These judgment differences among format conditions suggest that, depending on the method of information presentation, subjects differently partition event sequences into discrete event pairings.     

Self-punitive behavior in humans: Effects of a self-fulfilling prophecy

Human subjects were exposed to contingencies which programmed aversive tones (100 db). Two types of contingencies were employed: self-confirming (i.e., self-fulfilling prophecies), in which the aversive tone was occasioned by the prediction it was about to occur; and self-disconfirming, in which the tone was probable when subjects predicted it would not occur. Experiments 1 and 2 used a modified classical conditioning paradigm, and demonstrated that a self-confirming contingency maintained reliable self-punitive responding, i.e., subjects consistently predicted and therefore obtained tones on every trial. Subjects in Experiment 3 were instructed to express predictions continuously throughout four sessions to ensure adequate sampling of the various predictions. Subjects exposed to a self-disconfirming contnngency reliably evidenced awareness of the contingency in effect (judged by answers on a postexperimental questionnaire), whereas subjects exposed to a self-confirming contingency failed to show effective avoidance behavior or contingency awareness. Experiment 4 investigated free-operant self-punitive behavior, utilizing a single prediction response button, which subjects depressed repeatedly. Subjects were exposed to either periodic or aperiodic punishment schedules over as many as four sessions. In general, more persistent self-punitive responding was found in the groups receiving periodic punishment. The results from the four experiments show that self-confirming contingencies can effectively prolong self-punitive responding in human subjects. The findings are consistent with a blocking interpretation of self-punitive behavior, which asserts that when an aversive event is already predicted by stimuli in the situation (including temporal cues), the association between a response and punishment is impaired, and self-punitive responding is likely to be maintained. An integration of human and animal self-punitive research is proposed.     

Structural awareness mitigates the effect of delay in human causal learning

Many studies have demonstrated that reinforcement delays exert a detrimental influence on human judgments of causality. In a free-operant procedure, the trial structure is usually only implicit, and delays are typically manipulated via trial duration, with longer trials tending to produce both longer experienced delays and also lower objective contingencies. If, however, a learner can become aware of this trial structure, this may mitigate the effects of delay on causal judgments. Here we tested this “structural-awareness” hypothesis by manipulating whether response–outcome contingencies were clearly identifiable as such, providing structural information in real time using an auditory tone to delineate consecutive trials. A first experiment demonstrated that providing cues to indicate trial structure, but without an explicit indication of their meaning, significantly increased the accuracy of causal judgments in the presence of delays. This effect was not mediated by changes in response frequency or timing, and a second experiment demonstrated that it cannot be attributed to the alternative explanation of enhanced outcome salience. In a third experiment, making trial structure explicit and unambiguous, by telling participants that the tones indicated trial structure, completely abolished the effect of delays. We concluded that, with sufficient information, a continuous stream of causes and effects can be perceived as a series of discrete trials, the contingency nature of the input may be exploited, and the effects of delay may be eliminated. These results have important implications for human contingency learning and in the characterization of temporal influences on causal inference.     

Contingency learning with evaluative stimuli: testing the generality of contingency learning in a performance paradigm

In two experiments, we tested the generality of the learning effects in the recently-introduced color-word contingency learning paradigm. Participants made speeded evaluative judgments to valenced target words. Each of a set of distracting nonwords was presented most often with either positive or negative target words. We observed that participants responded faster on trials that respected these contingencies than on trials that contradicted the contingencies. The contingencies also produced changes in liking: in a subsequent explicit evaluative rating task, participants rated positively-conditioned nonwords more positively than negatively-conditioned nonwords. Interestingly, contingency effects in the performance task correlated with this explicit rating effect in both experiments. In Experiment 2, all effects reported were independent of subjective and objective contingency awareness (which was completely lacking), even when awareness was measured at the item level. Our results reveal that learning in this type of performance task extends to nonword-valence contingencies and to responses different from those emitted during the performance task. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories about the processes that underlie contingency learning in performance tasks and for research on evaluative conditioning.     

Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?

How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were present with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.     

The effect of contingency upon the appetitive conditioning of free-operant behavior

The problem of maintaining independence between response rates and reinforcement probabilities when determining the effect of varying the response-reinforcement contingency upon free-operant behavior was solved by programming local reinforcement probabilities for response and no response on a second-by-second basis. Fifty-seven rats were trained to lever-press on schedules of water reinforcement involving different values of contingency. All rats were first trained on a high positive contingency and then shifted to less positive, zero, or negative contingencies. Under these conditions, rate of lever-pressing declined appropriately when the contingency between response and reinforcement decreased or was made negative. The decline in rate produced by a zero contingency cannot be attributed to extinction, since the probability of reinforcement given the occurrence of a response was the same as for the positive contingency from which the shift to zero was made. That is, there was no change in the opportunity for response-reinforcement contiguity. It was concluded that the technique of programming local reinforcement probabilities offers promise for more critical examinations of the effects of contingency upon free-operant behavior.     

Discrimination of response-reinforcer and response-stimulus contingencies in pigeons

For three pigeons (Experiment 1), the presentation of a red response key ended with a food presentation either following two responses separated by at least 10 seconds (a DRL contingency) or following a 10-second response-free period (a DRO contingency). For three other birds (Experiment 2), a brief stimulus presentation terminated the DRL and DRO contingencies. A white side key was presented next and ended with response-dependent food following one contingency and a timeout following the other. Since the contingency on the red key was unsignaled, differential responding on the white side key could indicate that the two response-reinforcer relations had been discriminated. In Experiment 1, the red-key duration and number of responses influenced white-key responding following the contingency that predicted the timeout. A response-initiated DRO was instated, and the influence of red-key duration and response number on white-key responding was diminished. In both experiments, the 10-second time criterion in both contingencies was varied from 0.34 second to 10 seconds. Even at short time intervals the DRO and DRL contingencies were readily discriminated. Pigeons tended to class the two contingencies according to a rule that did not involve simply stimulus duration, numbers of responses, or even the time between a response and its consequence.     

Reinforcement rate and force proportional reinforcement

The research examines the consequences of making two reinforcement contingencies simultaneously available for the same bar-pressing response. Specifically, two experiments are described which concern the effects of reinforcement rate upon force proportional reinforcement (FPR). In Experiment 1, reinforcement rate was constrained by combining differential reinforcement of low rate with a force-proportional reinforcement contingency. The group of rats exposed to this regimen eventually showed a significant increase in response force compared to control groups. Experimental vs control response rates were not significantly different. In Experiment 2, reinforcement rate was affected through the expedient of relating the probability of obtaining a single pellet to the response force. The group for which the probability-force relationship was discontinuous came to exert higher forces than either a group for which the relationship was fairly continuous or an ordinary variable ratio control group. Response rate was significantly higher for the control group.     

Causal judgment from contingency information: Relation between subjective reports and individual tendencies in judgment

In two experiments, participants made causal judgments from contingency information for problems with different objective contingencies. After the judgment task, the participants reported how their judgments had changed following each type of contingency information. Some reported idiosyncratic tendencies--in other words, tendencies contrary to those expected under associative-learning and normative rule induction models of contingency judgment. These idiosyncratic reports tended to be better predictors of the judgments of those who made them than did the models. The results are consistent with the view that causal judgment from contingency information is made, at least in part, by deliberative use of acquired and sometimes idiosyncratic notions of evidential value, the outcomes of which tend, in aggregate, to be highly correlated with the outcomes of normative procedures.     

Human covariation judgment: Accuracy and strategy

Judgment strategy is proposed as a contributor to the variability of findings in past research on human covariation judgment. Mathematically sophisticated judgment strategies will accurately judge all event covariations. However, faulty judgment rules will also produce correct judgments of many event relationships. Several methods have been used in past research to identify subjects' strategies of covariation judgment. Each of these methods indicates that humans employ simplistic, error-prone rules to judge event relationships. Shifts in covariation strategy use are proposed as a source of past findings that judgment accuracy depends on the decision conditions.     

Selective attribution and the judgment of causality

Four experiments used a video game procedure to investigate the mechanism by which people are sensitive to the degree of contingency between two events. Subjects were presented with sets of trials on each of which they could perform a particular action and observe whether the action produced a particular outcome in a situation in which there was an alternative potential cause of the outcome. The experiments attempted to show that the process of selective attribution operates during exposure to a particular contingency and mediates the contingency judgment. In Experiment 1 the impact of outcomes occurring in the absence of the action was reduced by changing the location at which outcomes occurred following the action. Experiment 2 replicated this effect and showed that it was not due to simple changes in temporal contiguity, but rather was due to affecting the process of selective attribution. In Experiment 3 judgments were shown to increase when outcomes occurring in the absence of the action, outcomes which otherwise would reduce judgments of action-outcome contingency, were signaled. Finally, in Experiment 4 this effect was replicated, and in addition it was shown that the signaling effect is not simply due to the presence of the signal. For the effect to be shown, the signal must occur when the outcome occurs in the absence of the action.     

Depressive realism and the effect of intertrial interval on judgements of zero, positive, and negative contingencies

In three experiments we tested how the spacing of trials during acquisition of zero, positive, and negative response-outcome contingencies differentially affected depressed and nondepressed students' judgements. Experiment 1 found that nondepressed participants' judgements of zero contingencies increased with longer intertrial intervals (ITIs) but not simply longer procedure durations. Depressed groups' judgements were not sensitive to either manipulation, producing an effect known as depressive realism only with long ITIs. Experiments 2 and 3 tested predictions of Cheng's (1997) Power PC theory and the Rescorla-Wagner (1972) model, that the increase in context exposure experienced during the ITI might influence judgements most with negative contingencies and least with positive contingencies. Results suggested that depressed people were less sensitive to differences in contingency and contextual exposure. We propose that a context-processing difference between depressed and nondepressed people removes any objective notion of “realism” that was originally employed to explain the depressive realism effect (Alloy & Abramson, 1979).     

Contiguity and the outcome density bias in action-outcome contingency judgements

In cause-outcome contingency judgement tasks, judgements often reflect the actual contingency but are also influenced by the overall probability of the outcome, P(O). Action-outcome instrumental learning tasks can foster a pattern in which judgements of positive contingencies become less positive as P(O) increases. Variable contiguity between the action and the outcome may produce this bias. Experiment 1 recorded judgements of positive contingencies that were largely uninfluenced by P(O) using an immediate contiguity procedure. Experiment 2 directly compared variable versus constant contiguity. The predicted interaction between contiguity and P(O) was observed for positive contingencies. These results stress the sensitivity of the causal learning mechanism to temporal contiguity.     

Instrumental judgment and performance under variations in action-outcome contingency and contiguity

The intentional theory of instrumental performance proposes that performance of an action is determined in part by a belief about its causal effectiveness in producing a desired outcome. At variance with this notion, previous implicit learning experiments appear to have yielded dissociations between subjects' performance and beliefs. In two experiments, subjects were given an opportunity to perform an action--pressing a key on a computer keyboard--which was associated with an outcome on the computer screen according to a free-operant contingency. The subjects in one group were asked to judge the effectiveness of the action in causing the outcome, while those in a second group were asked to maximize their points score under a payoff schedule. In the first study, the effect of varying the contingency between the action and outcome was examined by keeping the probability of an outcome contiguous with an action constant and varying the probability of an outcome in the absence of an action. Performance and judgments showed a comparable sensitivity to variations of the instrumental contingency. In the second study, the delay between the action and the resultant outcome was varied. Increasing the action-outcome delay from 0 sec up to 4 sec produced a systematic decline in both causal judgments and performance relative to noncontingent, control conditions. These results are in accord with the intentional theory of performance, but they present difficulties for the notion of implicit learning.     

Making causal judgments from the proportion of confirming instances: the pCI rule

It is proposed that causal judgments about contingency information are derived from the proportion of confirmatory instances (pCI) that are evaluated as confirmatory for the causal candidate. In 6 experiments, pCI values were manipulated independently of objective contingencies assessed by the deltaP rule. Significant effects of the pCI manipulations were found in all cases, but causal judgments did not vary significantly with objective contingencies when pCI was held constant. The experiments used a variety of stimulus presentation procedures and different dependent measures. The power PC theory, a weighted version of the deltaP rule, the Rescorla-Wagner associative learning model (R. A. Rescorla & A. R Wagner, 1972), and the deltaD rule, which is the frequency-based version of the pCI rule, were unable to account for the significant effects of the pCI manipulations. These results are consistent with a general explanatory approach to causal judgment involving the evaluation of evidence and updating of beliefs with regard to causal hypotheses.     

Recency and primacy in causal judgments: Effects of probe question and context switch on latent inhibition and extinction

Traditional associative models assume that associative weights are updated on a trial-by-trial basis. As a result, it is usually expected that responses based on these weights will tend to reflect the most recently presented contingencies. However, a number of studies of human causal judgments have shown primacy effects, wherein judgments obtained at the end of a series of trials are more strongly influenced by a contingency that was in force early in the sequence than by a contingency that was in force later in the sequence. The experiments described in this article replicated other work showing that requesting causal judgments during a sequence can reverse primacy and produce strong recency effects. Evidence was also obtained to suggest that primacy effects are produced by an interaction between latent inhibition and extinction processes and that requesting a judgment affects both of these processes.     

Time and rate measures in choice transitions

Three experiments with pigeons studied the relation between time and rate measures of behavior under conditions of changing preference. Experiment 1 studied a concurrent chain schedule with random-interval initial links and fixed-interval terminal links; Experiment 2 studied a multiple chained random-interval fixed-interval schedule; and Experiment 3 studied simple concurrent random-interval random-interval schedules. In Experiment 1, and to a lesser extent in the other two experiments, session-average initial-link wait-time differences were linearly related to session-average response-rate differences. In Experiment 1, and to a lesser extent in Experiment 3, ratios of session-average initial-link wait times and response rates were related by a power function. The weaker relations between wait and response measures in Experiment 2 appear to be due to the absence of competition between responses. In Experiments 1 and 2, initial-link changes lagged behind terminal-link changes. These findings may have implications for the relations between fixed- and variable-interval procedures and suggest that more attention should be paid to temporal measures in studies of free-operant choice.     

CONTINGENCY SPACES AND MEASURES IN CLASSICAL AND INSTRUMENTAL CONDITIONING1

The contingency between conditional and unconditional stimuli in classical conditioning paradigms, and between responses and consequences in instrumental conditioning paradigms, is analyzed. The results are represented in two- and three-dimensional spaces in which points correspond to procedures, or procedures and outcomes. Traditional statistical and psychological measures of association are applied to data in classical conditioning. Root mean square contingency, ø, is proposed as a measure of contingency characterizing classical conditioning effects at asymptote. In instrumental training procedures, traditional measures of association are inappropriate, since one degree of freedom—response probability—is yielded to the subject. Further analysis of instrumental contingencies yields a surprising result. The well established “Matching Law” in free-operant concurrent schedules subsumes the “Probability Matching” finding of mathematical learning theory, and both are equivalent to zero contingency between responses and consequences.