Two Sources of Color-Word Contingency Learning: Episodic Retrieval of Stimulus-Response Bindings and Propositional Knowledge

There is an ongoing debate about the cognitive mechanisms behind human contingency learning (CL). Although, in some studies, episodic retrieval of previous responses fully explained the observed CL effects (C. G. Giesen et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2020), other findings suggest that global contingencies have an additional effect on behavior (Xu & Mordkoff, 2020). In a high-powered (N = 500), preregistered study, we investigated CL effects after controlling for episodic retrieval of distractor-target (S-S) and distractor-response (S-R) bindings. Retrieval explained a large part of the CL effect. However, we still found a reliable residual CL effect even after controlling for retrieval. Notably, the residual CL effect depended on contingency awareness: The residual CL effect only occurred for trials for which participants correctly detected the respective color-word contingency, whereas for trials without contingency awareness, there was no residual CL effect. Collectively, our findings suggest that human CL is driven by two independent sources: (a) episodic retrieval of S-S and S-R bindings and (b) propositional knowledge of the contingencies.