Pseudoscientific Health Beliefs and the Perceived Frequency of Causal Relationships

Beliefs about cause and effect, including health beliefs, are thought to be related to the frequency of the target outcome (e.g., health recovery) occurring when the putative cause is present and when it is absent (treatment administered vs. no treatment); this is known as contingency learning. However, it is unclear whether unvalidated health beliefs, where there is no evidence of cause–effect contingency, are also influenced by the subjective perception of a meaningful contingency between events. In a survey, respondents were asked to judge a range of health beliefs and estimate the probability of the target outcome occurring with and without the putative cause present. Overall, we found evidence that causal beliefs are related to perceived cause–effect contingency. Interestingly, beliefs that were not predicted by perceived contingency were meaningfully related to scores on the paranormal belief scale. These findings suggest heterogeneity in pseudoscientific health beliefs and the need to tailor intervention strategies according to underlying causes.

Proportion of Conflict, Contingency Learning, and Recency Effects in a Stroop Task

Recent research on the relation between learning and cognitive control has assumed that conflict modulates learning, either by increasing arousal and hence improving learning in high conflict situations (Verguts & Notebaert, 2008), or by inducing control, and hence inhibiting the processing of distracters and their eventual association with the imperative responses (Whitehead et al., 2018). We analyze whether the amount of conflict, manipulated through the proportion of congruency in a set of Stroop inducer trials, affects learning of contingencies established on diagnostic trials composed by neutral words associated with color responses. The results reproduced the list-wide proportion of congruency effect on the inducer trials, and showed evidence of contingency learning on the diagnostic trials, but provided no indication that this learning was modulated by the level of conflict. Specific analyses conducted to control for the impact of episodic effects on the expression of learning indicated that contingency effects were not driven by the incremental processes that could be expected by associative learning, but rather they were due to the impact of the most recent trial involving the same distracter. Accordingly, these effects disappeared when tested selectively on trials that required a non-matching response with respect to the previous occurrence of the distracter. We interpret this result in the context of the debate on how learning and memory interact with the processes of cognitive control.

Debiasing Causal Inferences: Over and Beyond Suboptimal Sampling

Background We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each of the learning trials. The reduction of causal judgments appeared to be influenced by differences in the frequency with which the participants decided to apply the potential cause, hence indicating that the intervention affected their information sampling strategies. Objective In the present study, we investigated whether one of these interventions also reduces causal illusions when covariation information is acquired passively. Method Forty-one psychology undergraduates received our debiasing intervention, while 31 students were assigned to a control condition. All participants completed a passive contingency learning task. Results We found weaker causal illusions in students that participated in the debiasing intervention, compared to the control group. Conclusion The intervention affects not only the way the participants look for new evidence, but also the way they interpret given information. Teaching implications Our data extending previous results regarding evidence-based educational interventions aimed to promote critical thinking to situations in which we act as mere observers.

EXPRESS: The Role of Contingency and Correlation in the Stroop Task

Facilitation (faster responses to Congruent trials compared to Neutral trials) in the Stroop task has been a difficult effect for models of cognitive control to explain. The current research investigated the role of word-response contingency, word-colour correlation, and proportion congruency in producing Stroop effects. Contingency and correlation refers to the probability of specific word-response and word-colour pairings that are implicitly learnt while performing the task. Pairs that have a higher probability of occurring are responded to faster, a finding that challenges top-down attention control accounts of Stroop task performance. However studies that try to experimentally control for contingency and correlation typically do so by increasing the proportion of incongruent trials in the task, which cognitive control accounts posit affects interference control via the top-down biasing of attention. The present research focused on whether facilitation is also affected by contingency and correlation while additionally looking at the effect of proportion congruency. This was done in two experiments that compared the typical design of Stroop task experiments (i.e., having equal proportions of Congruent and Incongruent trials but also contingency and correlational biases) to: a) a design that had unequal congruency proportions but no contingency or correlation (Experiment 1), and b) a design where the correlation is biased but proportion congruency and contingency were not (Experiment 2). Results did not support the hypotheses that contingency or correlation affected facilitation. Interference was almost halved in the alternative design of Experiment 2, demonstrating an effect of contingency learning in typical measures of Stroop interference.

Punishment insensitivity in humans is due to failures in instrumental contingency learning

Punishment maximises the probability of our individual survival by reducing behaviours that cause us harm, and also sustains trust and fairness in groups essential for social cohesion. However, some individuals are more sensitive to punishment than others and these differences in punishment sensitivity have been linked to a variety of decision-making deficits and psychopathologies. The mechanisms for why individuals differ in punishment sensitivity are poorly understood, although recent studies of conditioned punishment in rodents highlight a key role for punishment contingency detection (Jean-Richard-Dit-Bressel et al., 2019). Here, we applied a novel ‘Planets and Pirates’ conditioned punishment task in humans, allowing us to identify the mechanisms for why individuals differ in their sensitivity to punishment. We show that punishment sensitivity is bimodally distributed in a large sample of normal participants. Sensitive and insensitive individuals equally liked reward and showed similar rates of reward-seeking. They also equally disliked punishment and did not differ in their valuation of cues that signalled punishment. However, sensitive and insensitive individuals differed profoundly in their capacity to detect and learn volitional control over aversive outcomes. Punishment insensitive individuals did not learn the instrumental contingencies, so they could not withhold behaviour that caused punishment and could not generate appropriately selective behaviours to prevent impending punishment. These differences in punishment sensitivity could not be explained by individual differences in behavioural inhibition, impulsivity, or anxiety. This bimodal punishment sensitivity and these deficits in instrumental contingency learning are identical to those dictating punishment sensitivity in non-human animals, suggesting that they are general properties of aversive learning and decision-making.

Punishment insensitivity in humans is due to failures in instrumental contingency learning

Punishment maximises the probability of our individual survival by reducing behaviours that cause us harm, and also sustains trust and fairness in groups essential for social cohesion. However, some individuals are more sensitive to punishment than others and these differences in punishment sensitivity have been linked to a variety of decision-making deficits and psychopathologies. The mechanisms for why individuals differ in punishment sensitivity are poorly understood, although recent studies of conditioned punishment in rodents highlight a key role for punishment contingency detection (Jean-Richard-dit-Bressel et al., 2019). Here we applied a novel “Planets & Pirates” conditioned punishment task in humans, allowing us to identify the mechanisms for why individuals differ in their sensitivity to punishment. We show that punishment sensitivity is bimodally distributed in a large sample of normal participants. Sensitive and insensitive individuals equally liked reward and showed similar rates of reward-seeking. They also equally disliked punishment and did not differ in their valuation of cues that signalled punishment. However, sensitive and insensitive individuals differed profoundly in their capacity to detect and learn volitional control over aversive outcomes. Punishment insensitive individuals did not learn the instrumental contingencies, so they could not withhold behaviour that caused punishment and could not generate appropriately selective behaviours to prevent impending punishment. These differences in punishment sensitivity could not be explained by individual differences in behavioural inhibition, impulsivity, or anxiety. This bimodal punishment sensitivity and these deficits in instrumental contingency learning are identical to those dictating punishment sensitivity in non-human animals, suggesting that they are general properties of aversive learning and decision making.

Contingency learning is not modulated by cognitive control demands

People form associations between stimuli and responses, resulting in faster responses to stimuli that occur more frequently. This type of stimulus-response contingency learning has often been claimed to confound putative effects of cognitive control in conflict tasks, like the Stroop task. However, the underlying assumption that contingency learning itself is not modulated by cognitive control demand remains unanswered. To assess whether the presence and congruency of distracters alters contingency learning, we had participants perform a face-gender Stroop classification task, either without (“nonconflict task”) or with congruent and incongruent distractor word labels overlaid (“conflict task”). Importantly, we also manipulated the frequency at which specific face images were displayed (1, 5, or 10 times) in order to measure contingency learning. If cognitive demand facilitated contingency learning, we would see more pronounced learning effects in the conflict task than in the nonconflict task. By contrast, if cognitive demand interfered with contingency learning, we would see less pronounced learning effects in the conflict task. Across a preregistered within-participant and a separate between-participant Experiment, we observed additive main effects for image frequency and task type, with a standard contingency learning effect, a standard Stroop congruency effect, and faster categorization of faces when no distractor word label was presented. Crucially, there was little evidence for an interaction effect between task and stimulus frequency, thus documenting that contingency learning occurs independently of cognitive demand in a typical conflict task. Implications for these findings are discussed.