We investigate the processes involved in human contingency learning using the colour-word contingency learning paradigm. In this task, participants respond to the print colour of neutral words. Each word is frequently presented in one colour. Results show that participants respond faster and more accurately to words presented in their expected colour. In Experiment 1, we observed better performance for high relative to medium frequency wordcolour pairs, and for medium relative to low frequency

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... airs. Within the medium frequency condition, it did not matter whether the word was predictive of a currently-unpresented colour, or the colour was predictive of a currently-unpresented word. We conclude that a given word facilitates each potential response proportional to how often they co-occurred. In contrast, there was no evidence for costs associated with violations of high-frequency expectancies. Experiment 2 further introduced a novel word baseline condition, which also provided no evidence for competition between retrieved responses.