Therefore, the sensitivity of binding to our outcome blocking procedure strongly implies the involvement of associative mechanisms in producing SoA.
In the present experiment, participants performed the same outcome blocking procedure developed by Flach et al. (2006).
Flach, Osman, Dickinson, and Heyes (2006) developed an outcome blocking procedure in which the outcomes competed for association with the action.
Using an outcome blocking procedure, it was shown that training action outcome associations under conditions of increased surprise augmented this temporal linkage.
In the present study we use Flach et al's outcome blocking procedure to examine the influence of surprise on the learning of action outcome relations, and the impact this has on SoA.
Although we shall not recapitulate here the extensive discussion of associative explanations concerning the role of surprise in outcome blocking offered by Flach et al. (2006), the present results are compatible with the attentional account of Pearce and Hall (1980).
Finally in order to allow a more detailed evaluation of the methodology, in Table 5 are summarized the results of the histological outcome (blocks of rows) along with the cytological categories to which the cases were assigned (rows) in combination with the CART model outcome (columns).
Using an outcome blocking procedure we were able to show that training with more surprising outcomes augmented binding at test (at least on later test trials), indicative on an increased SoA This result confirms the importance of learning in the context of SoA.
Groups did not differ in four other distant outcomes (Block Design, Object Assembly, Raven's Colored Matrices, and Auditory Analysis), nor did they differ in the two closely related outcomes of rhythm discrimination.
We also noted inverse association tendencies that did not reach statistical significance for the other neuropsychological tests except for four outcomes (Block Design and Copying Block tests at ages 42 and 54 months).
