title: The persistent impact of incidental experience.
abstract: As we perform daily activities--driving to work, unlocking the office door, or grabbing a coffee cup--our actions seem automatic and preprogrammed. Nonetheless, routine, well-practiced behavior is continually modulated by incidental experience: In repetitive experimental tasks, recent (~4) trials reliably influence performance and action choice. Psychological theories downplay the significance of sequential effects, explaining them as rapidly decaying perturbations of behavior, with no long-term consequences. We challenged this traditional perspective in two experiments designed to probe the impact of more distant experience, finding evidence for effects spanning up to a thousand intermediate trials. We present a normative theory in which these persistent effects reflect optimal adaptation to a dynamic environment exhibiting varying rates of change. The theory predicts a heavy-tailed decaying influence of past experience, consistent with our data, and suggests that individual incidental experiences are catalogued in a temporally extended memory utilized in order to optimize subsequent behavior.
authors: Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA, wildermh@colorado.edu.
authors: Matthew H
authors: MH
authors: Wilder
authors: Matt
authors: M
authors: Jones
authors: Alaa A
authors: AA
authors: Ahmed
authors: Tim
authors: T
authors: Curran
authors: Michael C
authors: MC
authors: Mozer
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult