Open AccessMore frequent, shorter trials enhance acquisition in a training session: There is a free lunch!
Author(s) -
Robin A. Murphy,
James E. Witnauer,
Santiago Castiello,
Anna Tsvetkov,
Audrey Li,
Doriann M. Alcaide,
Ralph R. Miller
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
journal of experimental psychology. general
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.521
H-Index - 161
eISSN - 1939-2222
pISSN - 0096-3445
DOI - 10.1037/xge0000910
Subject(s) - duration (music) , clinical trial , event (particle physics) , psychology , session (web analytics) , audiology , statistics , medicine , computer science , mathematics , art , physics , quantum mechanics , world wide web , literature
The strength of the learned relation between two events, a model for causal perception, has been found to depend on their overall statistical relation, and might be expected to be related to both training trial frequency and trial duration. We report five experiments using a rapid-trial streaming procedure containing Event 1-Event 2 pairings (A trials), Event 1-alone (B trials), Event 2-alone (C trials), and neither event (D trials), in which trial frequencies and durations were independently varied. Judgements of association increased with increasing frequencies of A trials and decreased with increasing frequencies of both B and C trials but showed little effect of frequency of D trials. Across five experiments, a weak but often significant effect of trial duration was also detected, which was always in the same direction as trial frequency. Thus, both frequency and duration of trials influenced learning, but frequency had decidedly stronger effects. Importantly, the benefit of more trials greatly outweighed the observed reduction in effect size caused by a proportional decrease in trial duration. In experiment 5, more trials of proportionately shorter duration enhanced effects on contingency judgments despite a shortening of the training session. We consider the observed 'frequency advantage' with respect to both frequentist models of learning and models based on information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).