Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous work has found that the contingencies experienced at UK traffic lights can affect drivers behavior potentiallyleading to risky driving. However, these studies did not account for the sequences experienced at traffic lights. Thisexperiment seeks to rectify this. As with previous research we used an incidental go/no-go task in which colored shapeswere stochastically predictive of whether a response was required. The stimuli encoded the contingencies of traffic lightsand their appropriate response, for example, stimuli G was a go cue, mimicking the response to a green light. Crucially,cues were displayed in the sequences experienced at traffic lights. Supporting earlier work, the 50/50 cue that mimickedamber traffic lights was experienced as a go cue, and the stop cue that represented red lights was responded to as a neutralcue. The sequences seemed to enhance this pattern of learning with much larger effect sizes than previously found.