Modeling spatial and temporal contiguities in the overshadowing effect of learning
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Amirali, Shanzeh N.
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Abstract
The overshadowing effect occurs when the presence of a more salient cue reduces learning about a competing cue presented simultaneously. While overshadowing was traditionally believed to occur in all circumstances of associative learning, recent findings suggest that the effect only emerges under specific spatial and temporal conditions. Building on the hypothesis that contiguity between cues and outcomes is necessary for cue competition, this study uses supervised machine learning to identify the features that predict when overshadowing occurs. Behavioral data from Herrera et al. (2022) was analyzed across four experiments manipulating spatial (Exp 5, Supplementary Experiments 1 and 2) and temporal (Exp 2) contiguity. A series of random forest classifiers were trained to predict whether participants exhibited overshadowing based on task features such as landmark proximity, cue salience, trace duration, and performance metrics. Models trained with theory-based labels outperformed data-driven baselines, achieving up to 94.4% accuracy in spatial tasks. In the temporal domain, overshadowing was more prevalent in conditions with strong temporal proximity, and classifier performance was high despite a limited test set. A final combined model integrating both domains achieved 92.5% accuracy, with feature importances generalizing across spatial and temporal contexts. These results support the view that overshadowing is not a universal learning outcome but rather a parameter-dependent phenomenon. This is particularly evident in how spatial and temporal contiguity shape whether cues compete or are learned independently, highlighting contiguity’s general role across learning domains. This work provides a scalable computational framework for mapping the boundary conditions of cue competition and lays the groundwork for future modeling of cue interactions along a continuum that ranges from competition to facilitation with a diversity of outcomes (including an intermediate zone in which competition is not observed).
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Undergraduate Research Option Thesis