ABSTRACT
Two experiments are reported that demonstrate rate of learning in an allergy prediction task can be affected by the predictive history of the cues involved, even if that history relates to outcomes different to those being currently learned about. Predictive history is defined here as a cue's prior status as either a good or a poor predictor of outcomes. Our results are problematic for commonly employed associative theories of human contingency learning but also provide evidence for the sort of associability-change process envisaged by the Mackintosh (1975) theory.
