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Both rules and associations are required to predict human behaviour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

I. P. L. McLaren
Affiliation:
School of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter, EX4 4QG, United Kingdom. [email protected]

Abstract

I argue that the dual-process account of human learning rejected by Mitchell et al. in the target article is informative and predictive with respect to human behaviour in a way that the authors' purely propositional account is not. Experiments that reveal different patterns of results under conditions that favour either associative or rule-based performance are the way forward.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

Jones, F. & McLaren, I. P. L. (1999) Rules and associations. Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Hahn, M. & Stoness, S. C.. Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Le Pelley, M. E., Oakeshott, S. M. & McLaren, I. P. L. (2005a) Blocking and unblocking in human causal learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 31:5670.Google ScholarPubMed
Le Pelley, M. E., Oakeshott, S. M., Wills, A. J. & McLaren, I. P. L. (2005b) The outcome-specificity of learned predictiveness effects: Parallels between human causal learning and animal conditioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 31(2):226–36.Google ScholarPubMed
Livesey, E. J. & McLaren, I. P. L. (forthcoming) Discrimination and generalization along a simple dimension: Peak-shift and rule-governed responding. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes.Google Scholar
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