Superstitious perception: Response-independent reinforcement and punishment as determinants of recurring eccentric interpretations

This study provided controlled observations of a potential mechanism for the determination of the repetitive, aberrant perceptions or interpretations of everyday events that figure prominently in a range of psychological disorders: the adventitious reinforcement of acts of cognition by the actual co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Behaviour research and therapy 2009-10, Vol.47 (10), p.868-875
Main Author: Mellon, Robert C.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult and adolescent clinical studies
Attention
Biological and medical sciences
Choice Behavior
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Discrimination Learning
Emotions
Female
Humans
Male
Medical sciences
Mental disorders
Miscellaneous
Obsession, dysfunctional cognition
Perception
Photic Stimulation - methods
Psychological disorders
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychopathology. Psychiatry
Punishment
Reinforcement
Reinforcement (Psychology)
Response-independent punishment
Response-independent reinforcement
Sensory perception
Studies
Superstition
Superstitions
Superstitions - psychology
Visual Perception
Young Adult
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Summary:This study provided controlled observations of a potential mechanism for the determination of the repetitive, aberrant perceptions or interpretations of everyday events that figure prominently in a range of psychological disorders: the adventitious reinforcement of acts of cognition by the actual consequences of concurrent motor acts. Adults made a series of two-choice brightness discriminations; on 60% of trials, choosing the brighter stimulus produced a “correct” signal while errors produced an aversive sound. On 40% of trials, the choice stimuli did not in fact differ in brightness; the consequences of responding on these “identical stimuli” trials differed across blocks of trials. Thus, on these trials perceptual judgments were directly followed by events that they did not produce. When all choices on identical stimuli trials were punished with the “error” sound, subjects showed little preference for the left-side or right-side identical stimuli, but when all choices of identical stimuli were reinforced with the “correct” light, individual preferences for the left-side or the right-side stimuli substantially increased. As the consequences of responding on identical stimuli trials were independent of the stimuli chosen, these findings provide evidence for superstitious perception, the reinforcement of perceptual acts by events that do not depend upon their occurrence.
ISSN:0005-7967
1873-622X
DOI:10.1016/j.brat.2009.06.016