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Is there a criterion in criterial learning? Insights from studying feedback delays.

Matthew J. Crossley,Benjamin O. Pelzer,F. G. Ashby

Published 2026 in Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory and Cognition

ABSTRACT

The notion of a response criterion is ubiquitous in psychology, yet its cognitive and neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. Two experiments and extensive computational modeling were used to test between two strikingly different interpretations of the criterion. The traditional account is that decisions are made by comparing the stimulus value to a stored value of the criterion. A conceptually different interpretation is that learning instead is a process of associating responses with stimuli and that the criterion is simply the hypothetical value that separates stimuli associated with contrasting responses. The experiments and modeling tested between these two interpretations by contrasting the effects on criterial learning of feedback delays versus increases in the duration of the intertrial interval in a one-dimensional category-learning task. The empirical results strongly suggested that human criterial learning is sensitive to feedback delay but not to the duration of the intertrial interval. The computational modeling showed that these results are compatible with a stimulus-response learning account, and incompatible with all versions of the stored-criterion account, except for the subset of these models that explicitly assume the criterial updating process is sensitive to feedback delay. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

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