Overshadowed cues have reduced ability to retroactively interfere with other cues

The present series of experiments explores the interaction between retroactive interference and cue competition in human contingency learning. The results of two experiments show that a cue that has been exposed to a cue competition treatment (overshadowing) loses part of its ability to retroactively interfere with responding to a different cue that was paired with the same outcome. These results pose problems for associative models of contingency learning and are also difficult to explain in terms of current theories of causal reasoning. Additionally, it is proposed that in light of the interaction between interference and cue competition, interference could be used as an indirect measure for the study of cue competition effects. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Cue competition is one of themain topics explored by current research on associative learning. Since the early studies performed by Pavlov (1927), it is well known that pairing a cue, Y, with an unconditioned stimulus results in lower conditioned responding to Y, if another cue, A, has also been presented in compound with Y during training. This cue competition effect is known as overshadowing. Blocking (Kamin, 1968) and relative validity (Wagner, Logan, Haberlandt, & Price, 1968) are similar instances of cue competition: in all of them a target cue-outcome association is poorly learned or expressed because of its having been trained in compound with an alternative cue-outcome association. Interestingly, evidence coming from verbal learning studies performed with paired-associates tasks suggests that cue-interaction effects similar to overshadowing and blocking can occur even when the c. All rights reserved. cción General de Investigación of the Spanish Government (ref. SEJ2007dades e Investigación of the Basque Government (ref. PI2008-9 and apoyo a Investigación, Tecnología y Empresa of the Junta de Andalucía (ref. SEJ-406). os, Paco López, David Luque, Ralph Miller, Serban Musca, and Oskar Pineño ment, and Gumersida Alonso for her assistance in running Experiment 2.