Dr Oren Griffiths

College of Education, Psychology and Social Work, Flinders University

Title: Effects of non-contingency on learning, attention and effort

Abstract: Learned helplessness is one of the most widely recognized findings that psychology has produced in the public sphere. Much of the empirical work on this topic has focused on questions related to how repeated failure produces broadly generalizable decrements in motivation and performance. By contrast, relatively little work has looked at how people learn than an event is unpredictable when faced with non-contingency. This talk focuses on how this learning takes place, what the consequences of such learning are, and whether learning that a particular stimulus is unpredictable is qualitatively distinct to classic learned helplessness effects. We used a mix of behavioural, gaze fixation and pupil dilation measures, and conclude that environmental factors may play an important role in governing the consequences of exposure to non-contingency (in addition to cognitive attributions).