Automaticity can be established by consistently reinforcing contingencies during practice. During reinforcement learning, however, new relations can also be derived, which were never directly reinforced. For instance, reinforcing the overlapping contingencies A [right arrow] B and A [right arrow] C, can lead to a new relation B-C, which was never…

The present study examined how the magnitude of time-out duration following incorrect responses affected the ability of adults to learn simple visual discriminations. Sixty-four college students were randomly assigned to one of four groups that received a 0-, 5-, 10-, or 20-s time-out duration after an incorrect response. Each participant…