Dr G Urcelay, Dr J Prados
Applications accepted all year round
Self-Funded PhD Students Only
About the Project
Background:
The study of learning, memory and decision making has, by and large, been built upon behavioural deficits observed in these domains. Deficits in memory storage such as those that arise when multiple events compete during learning (i.e., cue competition phenomena) have become a benchmark that theories of learning account for, and their generality has been studied at different levels (behavioural, neural, and computational) and in different species (rodents, birds, monkeys and humans).
Antecedents:
Recently, the central status of competition phenomena was challenged by a failure to replicate the well-known “blocking effect” (Maes et al., 2016). This and many other unpublished results call for the determination of the conditions under which phenomena such as blocking and overshadowing are observed. In this regard, one of our own earlier studies in rodents has, to our knowledge, been first in identifying one variable (the contiguity between predictors and outcomes) that determines whether competition, no effect, or facilitation of learning is to occur (Urcelay & Miller, 2009). These observations were replicated in a study with human participants (Cunha et al., 2015). Based on these and other results, Urcelay (2017) has recently summarized three variables that determine competition, no effect, or facilitation between multiple events in learning.
Objectives:
The aim of the present proposal is to investigate, in human predictive and causal learning scenarios, the conditions that lead to competition and facilitation of learning. We propose to use predictive (food-allergy) and causal (action-outcome) learning scenarios and determine the generality of the findings by Urcelay, in addition to investigating the psychological processes that underlie competition and facilitation of learning.
Expected impact:
We seek a highly motivated student that will conduct experiments using human participants in these domains. We provide expertise in the field which, in combination with motivation and good scholarship, will lead to high impact publications. Once the putative psychological processes have been identified, we wish to pursue a computational analysis of the observed results, and the consequent development of new theoretical proposals to explain deficits and facilitation of learning as a consequence of multiple sources of information. In line with the current literature, we believe that this avenue will lead to lasting advances in the field.
References
Cunha, M. J., Forehand, M. R., & Angle, J. W. (2015). Riding coattails: When co-branding helps versus hurts less-known brands. Journal Of Consumer Research, 41(5), 1284-1300.
Maes, E., Boddez, Y., Alfei, J. M., Krypotos, A., D’Hooge, R., De Houwer, J., & Beckers, T. (2016). The elusive nature of the blocking effect: 15 failures to replicate. Journal of Experimental Psychology, doi:10.1037/xge0000200.
Urcelay, G. P. (2017) Competition and facilitation in compound conditioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, 43, 303-314.
Urcelay, G. P., & Miller, R. R. (2009). Potentiation and overshadowing in Pavlovian fear conditioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 340-356.