Dataset Information

Incidental covariation learning leading to strategy change.

ABSTRACT: As they approach a traffic light, drivers and pedestrians monitor the color (instructed stimulus feature) and/or the position of the signal (covarying stimulus feature) for response selection. Many studies have pointed out that instructions can effectively determine the stimulus features used for response selection in a task. This leaves open whether and how practice with a correlating alternative stimulus feature can lead to a strategy change from an instructed to a learned variant of performing the task. To address this question, we instructed participants to respond to the position of a stimulus within a reference frame, at the same time, during task performance, an unmentioned second stimulus feature, the color, covaried with stimulus position and allowed the use of an alternative response strategy. To assess the impact of the non-instructed stimulus feature of color on response selection throughout practice, the spatial position of the stimulus was ambiguous on some trials. Group average increases in color usage were based on a mixture of (1) participants who, despite extended practice on the covariation, exclusively relied on the instructed stimulus feature and (2) those who abruptly started to rely heavily on stimulus color to select responses in ambiguous trials. When the instructed and uninstructed feature predicted different actions, choices were still biased by the uninstructed color feature, albeit more weakly. A second experiment showed that the influence of color generalized across frequently and infrequently presented combinations of position and color. Strategy changes were accompanied by awareness in both experiments. The results suggest that incidental covariation learning can trigger spontaneous voluntary strategy change involving a re-configuration of the instructed task set.

SUBMITTER: Gaschler R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6345462 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Incidental covariation learning leading to strategy change.

Gaschler Robert R Schuck Nicolas W NW Reverberi Carlo C Frensch Peter A PA Wenke Dorit D

PloS one 20190124 1

As they approach a traffic light, drivers and pedestrians monitor the color (instructed stimulus feature) and/or the position of the signal (covarying stimulus feature) for response selection. Many studies have pointed out that instructions can effectively determine the stimulus features used for response selection in a task. This leaves open whether and how practice with a correlating alternative stimulus feature can lead to a strategy change from an instructed to a learned variant of performin ...[more]

PMID: 30677046

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Project description:Empirical evidence suggests that levodopa medication used to treat the motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) may either improve, impair or not affect specific cognitive processes. This evidence led to the 'dopamine overdose' hypothesis that levodopa medication impairs performance on cognitive tasks if they recruit fronto-striatal circuits which are not yet dopamine-depleted in early PD and as a result the medication leads to an excess of dopamine. This hypothesis has been supported for various learning tasks including conditional associative learning, reversal learning, classification learning and intentional deterministic sequence learning, on all of which PD patients demonstrated significantly worse performance when tested on relative to off dopamine medication. Incidental sequence learning is impaired in PD, but how such learning is affected by dopaminergic therapy remains undetermined. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of dopaminergic medication on incidental sequence learning in PD. We used a probabilistic serial reaction time task (SRTT), a sequence learning paradigm considered to make the sequence less apparent and more likely to be learned incidentally rather than intentionally. We compared learning by the same group of PD patients (n=15) on two separate occasions following oral administration of levodopa medication (on state) and after overnight withdrawal of medication (off state). Our results demonstrate for the first time that levodopa medication enhances incidental learning of a probabilistic sequence on the serial reaction time task in PD. However, neither group significantly differed from performance of a control group without a neurological disease, which indicates the importance of within group comparisons for identifying deficits. Levodopa medication enhanced incidental learning by patients with PD on a probabilistic sequence learning paradigm even though the patients were not aware of the existence of the sequence or their acquired knowledge. The results suggest a role in acquiring incidental motor sequence learning for dorsal striatal areas strongly affected by dopamine depletion in early PD.

Dataset Information

Incidental covariation learning leading to strategy change.

Publications

Incidental covariation learning leading to strategy change.

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