Association knowledge guides conjunctive predictions in novel situations

The mind readily learns cue-outcome associations where an object predicts a specific outcome. Previous work suggested that when multiple objects associated with different outcomes were jointly presented, the mind made conjunctive predictions that represented the common property of the associated outcomes. Using attentional tracking measures, we provided more evidence for the weighted summation framework when the conjunctive predictions involved spatial locations (Experiment 1) or conceptual categories (Experiment 2). Then, we examined the reverse of conjunction, where participants were presented with a single object, which is a part of an object pair that was previously associated with an outcome (Experiment 3). Rather than making predictions based on mental operations such as subtraction, we found that participants’ predictions were purely based on previous associations. These results together demonstrated the robust tendency to make conjunctive predictions based on knowledge of cue-outcome associations.