Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning how to make decisions from experience is often studied using probabilistic outcome prediction or choice tasks, as in conditioning, reward learning, or risky gambles (e.g., response A provides reward in 75% of the cases, response B in 25% over repeated trials with feedback). One debated phenomenon in such tasks is that of negative recency, describing that learners expect the rare event after observing a streak of common events (e.g., Gamblers fallacy). Here, we show that this behavior, despite instructing participants to use a visual stimulus, also occurs in probabilistic single-cue conditioning training, where participants predicted whether digging at a specific location on a plane (visual cue) leads to finding a Vase or Nothing (events), when they received reward for correct predictions. We manipulated reward magnitude in three conditions (equal for both common and rare events vs. high for common event vs. high for rare event, between factor). We further manipulated whether the label of the rare event was framed as event (finding a Vase) or non-event (finding Nothing; between factor). The results suggest, that reward magnitude affected the emergence of negative recency, being most prevalent when correctly predicting the rare event yielded a high reward, and least prevalent when the common event yielded a high reward. Interestingly, the event label instead rather affected when the rare event was expected, such that common Vase runs were expected to end earlier than common Nothing runs. We discuss the findings from conditioning and economic perspectives, generally concerning experience-based learning.