How Salience of a Cue Effects Blocking in Associative Learning
Emily Wang
Department of Psychology
Faculty Supervisor: Gaurav R. Suri
Blocking occurs after stimuli becomes paired with a predicted response, in which attempting to add an additional stimuli becomes difficult to associate with the predicted response.In a study by Denton and Kruschke (2006), they proposed that cues that are salient are less susceptible to be blocked, suggesting this to a shift in attention. However, in a study done by Le Pelley et al. (2014), found that the salient stimuli was even more strongly blocked than the non-salient stimuli. In this case, using an allergy paradigm with foods of various salience ranked by survey (e.g., flamingo being more salient than an apple). The salient stimuli in the Le Pelley et al. (2014) study, such as the flamingo, would likely not have as much connective associations as an apple in the context of food, explaining the results to be inconsistent with the Denton and Kruschke (2006) study. In this study, we instead use pictures of faces to pair associations to abstract buttons control for prior associations, and using famous faces for our salient condition.