Associations or repetitions? Testing the basis of the Perruchet effect in voluntary response speed.

The Perruchet effect refers to a dissociation between the conscious expectancy of an outcome and the strength or speed of responding in anticipation of that outcome. This dissociation is considered by some to be the best evidence for multiple learning processes with expectancy governed by participants' explicit beliefs and responding driven by the associative history of the cues that partially predict the outcome. However, an alternative nonassociative explanation is that the trends in responding are the result of recent experience with the same outcome (i.e., repetition priming based on event recency). This explanation casts doubt on the theoretical import of the dissociation because it suggests that associative learning may not be involved in generating the observed trends in response strength. Associative accounts of the Perruchet effect predict a weakening of the response strength trends when the cues perfectly predict the occurrence of the outcome. In two experiments, we compared a condition with two cues that were each perfect predictors of an outcome with control conditions in which the cues did not perfectly predict the outcome. In both experiments, the typical downward trend in response time (RT) observed in Perruchet effect experiments was substantially weaker (and indeed absent) for the predictive group, suggesting an associative contribution to the effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Testing the limits of the Perruchet effect in choice response time tasks.

The Perruchet effect refers to a dissociation between trends in the conscious expectancy of an event and trends in the strength or the speed of responding to that event, which suggests that learned changes in the performance of a response may be automatic. Despite being consistently demonstrated in conditioning studies and simple reaction time (RT) tasks, mixed results have been found in the choice variant of the Perruchet effect, especially when expectancy and responding are measured concurrently (that is, on the same trial). The present experiments examined why the dissociation disappears when concurrent measurement is used by directly comparing trials on which expectancy is measured to trials on which expectancy is not measured. In Experiment 1, expectancy was measured on a randomly chosen 50% of trials, whereas expectancy was measured every fourth trial in Experiment 2. In both experiments, the Perruchet effect was weakened on trials that immediately followed an expectancy rating but was still clearly evident on other trials, suggesting that automatic facilitation of RT based on recent trial history is temporarily masked, rather than abolished, by a concurrent expectancy judgment. (PsycINFO Database Record