Temporal and spatial contiguity are necessary for competition between events

Abstract

Over the last 50 years, cue competition phenomena have shaped theoretical developments in animal and human learning. However, recent failures to obtain the well-known blocking effect in standard conditioning procedures, as well as the lengthy and on-going debate surrounding cue competition in the spatial learning literature, have cast doubts on the generality of competition phenomena. In the present study, we manipulated temporal contiguity between predictors and outcomes (Experiments 1-4), and spatial contiguity between landmarks and goals in spatial learning (Experiments 5-7). Across different parametric variations, we observed overshadowing when temporal and spatial contiguity were strong, but no overshadowing when contiguity was weak. Thus, across temporal and spatial domains, we observed that contiguity is necessary for competition to occur, and that competition between cues during learning is absent when cues were either spatially or temporally discontiguous. Consequently, we advance a model in which the contiguity of cues is accounted for, and which can reconcile the previously contradictory findings observed in spatial and non-spatial domains.