The influence of feedback valence in associative learning
Section snippets
Experimental design
Twelve right-handed participants (five male, seven female) aged 18 to 27 years (average age 20 years) gave written informed consent in accordance with the Dartmouth College human subjects committee. Subjects were told that the study would examine their ability to learn simple response associations through trial and error.
On each trial, the subject saw a single letter stimulus and pressed one of two response keys with either the index or middle finger of the right hand. The stimulus set
Behavior
We first examined how well the participants learned the associations under the limited feedback conditions employed in the current study. To this end, we looked at responses on trials to stimuli that had been previously linked to informative feedback (paired trials). Participants responded correctly on 80.69% ± 9.89 (average ± SD) of the paired trials in the positive feedback condition, and 73.62% ± 13.05 in the negative feedback condition. Both values were significantly greater than a chance
Discussion
Learning requires the use of feedback. Behavior can be positively reinforced to promote a desired behavior; alternatively, behavior can be negatively reinforced in an effort to decrease the likelihood of an undesirable behavior. In most empirical studies of reinforcement, positive and negative reinforcements are intermixed, at least implicitly. In the current study, we introduced a task in which feedback was completely uninformative on a large proportion of trials. In this way, we sought to
Conclusion
An important form of associative learning requires the arbitrary linkage of an action to a stimulus. Most studies of associative learning use a trial and error approach (Toni and Passingham, 1999, Toni et al., 2001) in which feedback is provided on every trial. This procedure makes it difficult to dissociate the effects of feedback unless a large temporal gap separates the stimulus, response, and feedback signals. By separating blocks that used positive and negative feedback in combination with
Acknowledgments
Supported by PHS grants NS33504 and NS40813. Corresponding author: Scott T. Grafton, M.D., Sage Center for the Study of Mind, Department of Psychology, Psychology East, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA 93106.
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