Effects of Concurrent Load on Feature- and Rule-Based Generalization in Human Contingency Learning

The effect of concurrent load on generalization performance in human contingency learning was examined in 2 experiments that employed the combined positive and negative patterning procedure of Shanks and Darby (1998). In Experiment 1, we tested 32 undergraduates and found that participants who were trained and tested under full attention showed generalization consistent with the application of an opposites rule (i.e., single cues signal the opposite outcome to their compound), whereas participants trained and tested under a concurrent cognitive load showed generalization consistent with surface similarity. In Experiment 2, we replicated the effect with 148 undergraduates and provided evidence that it was the presence of concurrent load during training, rather than during testing, that was critical. Implications for associative, inferential, and dual-process accounts of human learning are discussed.