This experiment investigated how prior beliefs affect young and older adults' ability to detect differences in objective contingency. Participants received new evidence that the objective contingency between two events was positive, negative, or zero when they believed that there was a positive or negative relationship between events, when they believed that the events were unrelated, and when they had no knowledge of the relationship between the events. They were then asked to estimate the objective contingency and recall the contingency evidence. Beliefs that events were or could be related improved young adults' contingency discrimination. Moreover, these beliefs did not produce biases in young adults' memory for the contingency evidence, but rather affected how they weighted this evidence at judgment. In contrast, these same beliefs did not improve older adults' contingency discrimination, but did produce biases in their memory for the evidence that were similar to those seen in their judgment. These findings are discussed in terms of age-related changes in working memory executive processes that impair older adults' ability to fully evaluate both belief-confirming and disconfirming contingency evidence and update their beliefs with this information.

Older adults easily learn probabilistic relationships between cues and outcomes when the predictive event is the occurrence of a cue, but have greater difficulty when the predictive event is the nonoccurrence of a cue (Mutter & Pliske, 1996; Mutter & Plumlee, 2004; Mutter & Williams, 2004). This study explored whether this age-related deficit occurs in a simpler learning context and whether it might be related to working memory (WM) decline. We gave younger and older adults simultaneous discrimination tasks that allowed us to compare their ability to learn deterministic relationships when either the occurrence (feature positive; FP) or the nonoccurrence (feature negative; FN) of a distinctive feature predicted reinforcement. We also included a group of younger adults who performed the discrimination tasks under a concurrent WM load. Both age and WM load had a detrimental effect on initial FP and FN discrimination; however, these effects persisted only in FN discrimination after additional learning experience. Learning predictive relationships requires inductive reasoning processes that apparently do not operate as efficiently in individuals with reduced WM capacity. The impact of WM decline may ultimately be greater for negative cue-outcome relationships because learning these relationships requires more difficult inductive reasoning processes, which place greater demands on WM.

Contingency and temporal contiguity are important "cues to causality." In this study, we examined how aging influences the use of this information in response-outcome causal learning. Young and older adults judged a generative causal contingency (i.e., outcome is more likely when a response is made) to be stronger when response and outcome were contiguous than when the outcome was delayed. Contiguity had a similar beneficial effect on young adults' preventative causal learning (i.e., outcome is less likely when a response is made). However, older adults did not judge the preventative relationship to be stronger when the response and outcome were separated by a short delay or when the outcome immediately followed their response. These findings point to a fundamental age-related decline in the acquisition of preventative causal contingencies that may be due to changes in the utilization of cues for the retrieval of absent events.

Age differences in causal judgment are consistently greater for preventative/negative relationships than for generative/positive relationships. We used a feature analytic procedure (Mandel & Lehman, 1998) to determine whether this effect might be due to differences in young and older adults' integration of contingency evidence during causal induction. To reduce the impact of age-related changes in learning/memory we presented contingency evidence for preventative, non-contingent, and generative relationships in summary form and to induce participants to integrate greater or lesser amounts of this evidence, we varied the meaningfulness of the causal context. Young adults showed greater flexibility in their integration processes than older adults. In an abstract causal context, there were no age differences in causal judgment or integration, but in meaningful contexts, young adults' judgments for preventative relationships were more accurate than older adults' and they assigned more weight to the contingency evidence confirming these relationships. These differences were mediated by age-related changes in processing speed. The decline in this basic cognitive resource may place boundaries on the amount or the type of evidence that older adults can integrate for causal judgment. KeywordsAging; causal judgment; integrative processing; working memory People can acquire knowledge of the causal structure of the world through experience or description (Shanks, 1991). In the first case, direct observations of instances in which the presence or absence of a putative cause leads to the presence or absence of a target effect accumulate over an extended period of time. For example, one can learn whether a particular food causes an allergic reaction by observing over several months instances in which a reaction does or does not occur after consuming or not consuming the food. In the second case, this contingency evidence is provided in the form of a summary of the overall frequencies of the cause and effect event state combinations or from linguistic descriptions of causal scenarios. Thus, one can infer that a food is the putative cause of salmonella poisoning by reading in the newspaper that out of a group of people who consumed the food a large number became sick whereas out of a group of people who did not consume the food no one became sick. Learning and memory clearly play a larger role in the acquisition of contingency evidence through Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sharon A. Mutter, Department of Psychology, Western Kentucky University, 1906 College Heights Blvd. #21030, Bowling Green, KY 42101. sharon.mutter@wku.edu. Publisher's Disclaimer: The following manuscript is the final accepted manuscript. It has not been subjected to the final copyediting, fact-checking, and proofreading required for formal publication. It is not the definitive, publisher-authenticated version. The American Psychological Association and its Council of Editors disclaim any responsibility or liabilities fo...

We assessed how age influences associative and rule-based processes in causal learning using the Shanks and Darby (1998) concurrent patterning discrimination task. In Experiment 1, participants were divided into groups based on their learning performance after 6 blocks of training trials. High discrimination mastery young adults learned the patterning discrimination more rapidly and accurately than moderate mastery young adults. They were also more likely to induce the patterning rule and use this rule to generate predictions for novel cues, whereas moderate mastery young adults were more likely to use cue similarity as the basis for their predictions. Like moderate mastery young adults, older adults used similarity-based generalization for novel cues, but they did not achieve the same level of patterning discrimination. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were trained to the same learning criterion. Older adults again showed deficits in patterning discrimination and, in contrast to young adults, even when they reported awareness of the patterning rule, they used only similarity-based generalization in their predictions for novel cues. These findings suggest that it is important to consider how the ability to code or use cue representations interacts with the requirements of the causal learning task. In particular, age differences in causal learning seem to be greatest for tasks that require rapid coding of configural representations to control associative interference between similar cues. Configural coding may also be related to the success of rule-based processes in these types of learning tasks.