A causal contiguity effect that persists across time scales.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition A Causal Contiguity Effect That Persists Across Time Scales

Knowledge mediates the timeframe 1 Running head: TEMPORAL CONTIGUITY IN CAUSAL INDUCTION Knowledge mediates the timeframe of covariation assessment in human causal induction

How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence o...

Abolishing the effect of reinforcement delay on human causal learning.

Associative learning theory postulates two main determinants for human causal learning: contingency and contiguity. In line with such an account, participants in Shanks, Pearson, and Dickinson (1989) failed to discover causal relations involving delays of more than two seconds. More recent research has shown that the impact of contiguity and delay is mediated by prior knowledge about the timefr...

Probability and Contiguity Trade-Offs in Causal Induction

Two experiments investigated the roles of contingency and temporal contiguity in causal reasoning, and the trade-off between them. Participants observed an ongoing, continuous stream of events, which was not segmented into discrete learning trials. Four potential candidate causes competed for explanatory strength with respect to a single dichotomous effect. The effect was contingent on two of t...

Reply to Farrell and Lewandowsky: Recency-contiguity interactions predicted by the temporal context model.

Farrell and Lewandowsky (2008) argued that the temporal context model (TCM; Howard & Kahana, 2002) cannot explain nonmonotonicities in the contiguity effect seen at extreme lags. However, TCM actually predicts these nonmonotonicities to the extent that end-of-list context persists as a retrieval cue during recall and to the extent that end-of-list context generates a recency effect. We show tha...