Rethinking temporal contiguity and the judgement of causality: effects of prior knowledge, experience, and reinforcement procedure.

Full Abstract

Time plays a pivotal role in causal inference. Nonetheless most contemporary theories of causal induction do not address the implications of temporal contiguity and delay, with the exception of associative learning theory. Shanks, Pearson, and Dickinson (1989) and several replications (Reed, 1992, 1999) have demonstrated that people fail to identify causal relations if cause and effect are separated by more than two seconds. In line with an associationist perspective, these findings have been interpreted to indicate that temporal lags universally impair causal induction. This interpretation clashes with the richness of everyday causal cognition where people apparently can reason about causal relations involving considerable delays. We look at the implications of cause-effect delays from a computational perspective and predict that delays should generally hinder reasoning performance, but that this hindrance should be alleviated if reasoners have knowledge of the delay. Two experiments demonstrated that (1) the impact of delay on causal judgement depends on participants' expectations about the timeframe of the causal relation, and (2) the free-operant procedures used in previous studies are ill-suited to study the direct influences of delay on causal induction, because they confound delay with weaker evidence for the relation in question. Implications for contemporary causal learning theories are discussed.

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Author information

Author/s: Buehner, Marc J (MJ); May, Jon (J);

Affiliation: University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. buehnerm@cardiff.ac.uk

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology (Q J Exp Psychol A), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2003-Jul; vol 56 (issue 5) : pp 865-90

Dates: Created 2003/07/09; Completed 2003/10/03; Revised 2006/11/15;

PMID: 12850993, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/6/2008)

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Adult
Cognition
Female
Humans

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