Benefiting from trial spacing without the cost of prolonged training: Frequency, not duration, of trials with absent stimuli enhances perceived contingency.

The statistical relation between two events influences the perception of how one event relates to the presence or absence of another. Interestingly, the simultaneous absence of both events, just like their mutual occurrence, is relevant for describing their contingency. In three experiments, we explored the relevance of coabsent events by varying the duration and frequency of trials without stimuli. We used a rapid trial streaming procedure and found that the perceived association between events is enhanced with increasing frequency of coabsent events, unlike the duration of coabsent events, which had little effect. These findings suggest ways in which the benefits of trial spacing, during which both events are absent, could be obtained without increasing total training time. Centrally, this can be done by frequent repeating of shortened coabsent events, each marked by a trial contextual cue. We discuss four potential accounts of how coabsent experience might be processed contributing to this effect: (a) contingency sensitivity, (b) testing effect, (c) reduced associative interference by the context, and (d) reduced encoding interference. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

More frequent, shorter trials enhance acquisition in a training session: There is a free lunch!

The strength of the learned relation between two events, a model for causal perception, has been found to depend on their overall statistical relation, and might be expected to be related to both training trial frequency and trial duration. We report five experiments using a rapid-trial streaming procedure containing Event 1-Event 2 pairings (A trials), Event 1-alone (B trials), Event 2-alone (C trials), and neither event (D trials), in which trial frequencies and durations were independently varied. Judgements of association increased with increasing frequencies of A trials and decreased with increasing frequencies of both B and C trials but showed little effect of frequency of D trials. Across five experiments, a weak but often significant effect of trial duration was also detected, which was always in the same direction as trial frequency. Thus, both frequency and duration of trials influenced learning, but frequency had decidedly stronger effects. Importantly, the benefit of more trials greatly outweighed the observed reduction in effect size caused by a proportional decrease in trial duration. In experiment 5, more trials of proportionately shorter duration enhanced effects on contingency judgments despite a shortening of the training session. We consider the observed 'frequency advantage' with respect to both frequentist models of learning and models based on information. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).