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Research Article

Stable Individual Differences in Occasion Setting

Published Online:September 17, 2019https://doi.org/10.1027/1618-3169/a000453

Abstract

Abstract. In the current investigation, we classified participants as inhibitors or non-inhibitors depending on the extent to which they showed conditioned inhibition in a context that had been used for extinction of a conditioned response. This classification enabled us to predict participant responses in a second experiment which used a different design and a different experimental task. In the second experiment a feature-negative discrimination survived reversal training of the feature to a greater extent in the non-inhibitors than in the inhibitors and this result was supported by Bayesian analyses. We propose that the fundamental distinction between inhibitors and non-inhibitors is based on a tendency to utilize first-order (direct associations) or second-order (occasion-setting) strategies when faced with ambiguous information and that this classification is a stable individual differences attribute.

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