ABC renewal is reduced by a focused attention intervention

Abstract

In one experiment we investigated the effects of focused attention instructions on ABC renewal using a remote causal learning task with humans. During Phase 1, participants learned that a fictional medicine was associated with a side effect in Context A, then in Phase 2 they learned the medicine produced a different side effect in Context B. Subsequently, participants in the ABC_f group received focused attention instructions, while the ABC_u group was exposed to unfocused attention instructions. Participants in the rest of the groups did not receive any of those instructions. In the final phase, the response of the participants to the medicine was evaluated. We found that when participants were tested in Context B, they provided the most recently learned response, however, when tested in Context C, ABC renewal was reported. Nevertheless, the group that received the focused attention instructions showed lower levels of ABC renewal. The methodological and theoretical value of the present findings are discussed.