Evidence that a transient but cognitively demanding process underlies forward blocking

Abstract

Blocking is a learning phenomenon in which prior experience inhibits learning about novel cues. Though the phenomenon itself has been well documented, the details of blocking-related processes still remain contentious. Two experiments investigated whether participants were engaged in demanding cognitive processing during different portions of a standard blocking paradigm. Participants in Experiment 1 engaged in a simple secondary task while completing a standard blocking procedure. Results showed that performance on the secondary task was briefly diminished early in the second phase of the blocking paradigm, when the novel cue is first paired with the pretrained cue. Participants in Experiment 2 performed a difficult cognitive load task during either the early or the late portions of the second phase of blocking. The blocking effect was eliminated when learners were under load early in the second phase, but not when learners were under load late in the second phase. These results suggest that blocking relies on a cognitively demanding process with a distinct time course. Computational simulations illustrate how a model that includes top-down (i.e., cognitively demanding) attentional modulation can reproduce the observed behaviour. This suggests that purely associative processes are not sufficient to explain the observed behaviour. Implications for current accounts of blocking are discussed.