Learning of predictive relations between events depends on attention, not on awareness

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Abstract

It is generally assumed that storing predictive relations between two events (E1 consistently precedes E2) in memory as bi-directional associations does not require conscious awareness of this relation, whereas the formation of unidirectional associations that capture the direction of the relation (priming e1 activates e2, but e2 not e1) does. This study reports a set of experiments demonstrating that unidirectional associations can be formed even when awareness of the relation is actively prevented, if attention is “tuned” to process predictive relations. When participants engaged in predicting targets based on cues in an unrelated task before the actual acquisition phase, unidirectional associations were formed during this acquisition phase even though E1 was presented subliminally. This suggests that although processing the relation between events may often be accompanied by awareness of this relation, awareness is not a prerequisite for the formation of unidirectional associations.

Introduction

In order to stay one step ahead of the world, humans and other animals use its regularities in order to anticipate events. It is of crucial importance for survival to represent predictive relations between events accurately in memory, as erroneous predictions may have detrimental consequences. For example, failing to note that a particular roaring sound predicts an approaching car may turn out to be a fatal mistake. Not surprisingly, the fundamental ability to integrate related events or stimuli in memory has received a lot of attention in various areas in psychology, such as classical conditioning (Pavlov, 1927, Rescorla and Wagner, 1972), operant conditioning (Dickinson and Balleine, 1995, Skinner, 1938), evaluative conditioning (De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001), sequence learning (Nissen and Bullemer, 1987, Willingham et al., 1989), propositional learning (Mitchell, De Houwer, & Lovibond, 2009), and causal learning (Waldmann, Hagmayer, & Blaisdell, 2006). Within these lines of research, the debate on the extent to which this process of integration is dependent on top-down processes and requires awareness of the relation between events is still ongoing. Whereas on the one end models assume that events can be tied together in memory by merely bottom-up processes outside awareness, other theories assume that more sophisticated integration – that captures the order in which events occur – is dependent on top-down processes that rely on consciousness (see Shanks & St. John, 1994).

In the present paper we focus on the question of whether capturing and storing the order of a predictive relation between two events (event A precedes event B) in memory requires awareness of that relation. Echoing current distinctions between attention and consciousness (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010), we argue that the way in which predictive relations between events are learned and stored in memory depends on whether attention is “tuned” to process predictive relations, which does not necessarily require awareness of the relation itself. Specifically, we argue that bottom-up information processing can cause a bi-directional association between two events to be formed without awareness of their predictive relation. Such an association would bring to mind either one of the two events if the other is perceived. However, we aim to show here that if people’s attention system is tuned or prepared to process predictive relations, this is sufficient for the formation of unidirectional (predictive) structures, even when awareness of the relation between the events is actively prevented. These structures would bring to mind the second event if the first is perceived, but not the other way around.

Section snippets

Learning and awareness

Predictions of positive (rewarding) events or negative (punishing) events are highly important for any organism and learning of such predictive relations has been extensively studied in the field of classical conditioning. Numerous studies have demonstrated that if a certain conditioned stimulus (CS; e.g., light) is paired with a specific unconditioned stimulus (US; e.g., food), the CS starts to yield the same conditioned response (CR; e.g., salivating, Pavlov, 1927, Rescorla and Wagner, 1972).

Learning and attention

Recently, it has been argued that although awareness and attention (especially top-down attention) are often correlated in real-life experiences, people can process (relations between) stimuli in the absence of awareness if their attention system is prepared to do so (Dehaene et al., 2006, Dijksterhuis and Aarts, 2010, Moors and De Houwer, 2006). Such top-down attention has been demonstrated to affect the extent to which subliminal stimuli are processed and affect cognition and behavior (

The present research

In the present research, we aim to examine whether people process the relation between masked primes that predict targets in a different way by manipulating the mode of information processing in an earlier, seemingly unrelated task. Specifically, we tuned participants’ attention to process predictive relations or not in a task before the acquisition and test phase that were closely modeled after the studies of Alonso et al. (2006). In this manipulation task, participants had to quickly

Participants and design

Forty-four undergraduates participated in the experiment in exchange for a small monetary reward or extra course credit. They were randomly assigned to either the prediction condition or the no prediction condition.

Materials

Four categories of 16 Dutch words each were used. The categories “body parts”, “furniture”, and “animal” were taken from Alonso et al. (2006). Because of low word frequency ratings in Dutch, their fourth category (“plants”) was replaced by the category “food”. Categories were matched

Experiment 2

Experiment 2 served to rule out two important alternative explanations for the findings of Experiment 1. First, it could be the case that our attention-tuning manipulation affected the visibility of the primes. Although the results in the no prediction condition reveal the same pattern obtained by Alonso and colleagues (2006) for participants who were unaware of the predictive relations, it could be the case that the attention-tuning manipulation in the prediction condition may have caused

Experiment 3

The previous two experiments revealed that without attention-tuning, a facilitation effect was obtained in the test phase, whereas this effect was absent in the prediction condition. Although we regard this latter effect as evidence for unidirectional associations, one could argue that the null-effect in the attention-tuning prediction condition indicates that nothing was learned at all, for example because for some reason the processing of primes and targets was disrupted in this condition. To

General discussion

The present research tested the hypothesis that capturing the direction of a predictive relation does not necessarily require awareness, but is dependent on the way the attention system is tuned or prepared to process such relations. In Experiment 1 we found that tuning attention to process predictive relations by means of an earlier task caused unidirectional instead of bi-directional relations to be formed in a subsequent acquisition phase. Crucially, unidirectional relations were formed

Acknowledgments

The work in this paper was supported by VENI-Grant 451-06-014 and VICI-Grant 453-06-002 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

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