Competition and Facilitation During Learning: Further Evidence for the Role of Temporal Contiguity as a Determinant of Overshadowing, 2020-2022

Three experiments explored whether weakening temporal contiguity between auditory cues and an aversive outcome attenuated cue competition in an avoidance learning task with human participants. Overall, with strong temporal contiguity between auditory cues and the outcome during training (the offset of the predictive auditory signals concurred with the onset of the outcome), the target cue trained as part of a compound yielded less avoidance behaviour than the control cue trained alone, an instance of overshadowing. However, weakening temporal contiguity during training (inserting a 5-s trace) attenuated overshadowing, resulting in similar avoidance behaviour in response to the control and target cues. These results provide evidence that, as predicted by a recent modification of Pearce’s configural theory, temporal contiguity is critical for determining cue competition.