Aging and the Detection of Contingency in Causal Learning.

Abstract

Young and older participants' ability to detect negative, random, and positive response-outcome contingencies was evaluated using both contingency estimation and response rate adaptation tasks. Age differences in contingency estimation were consistently greater for negative than positive contingencies, and these differences, though still present, were smaller when response rate adaptation was used as the measure of contingency learning. Detecting causal contingency apparently becomes more difficult with age, especially when an oven numerical estimate of contingency must be provided and when the relationship between a causal event and an outcome is negative. A model that incorporates features of both associative and rule-based approaches to contingency learning (e.g., P. C. Price & J. F. Yates, 1995; D. R. Shanks, 1995) provides the best explanation for this pattern of findings.

Cholinergic effects on fear conditioning II: nicotinic and muscarinic modulations of atropine-induced disruption of the degraded contingency effect

“…Of importance, the deficit in processing interactive contextual information does not appear to be a unique feature of schizophrenia, as it has also been observed in healthy older patients (Bayen et al 2000;Braver and Barch 2002). Interestingly, with regard to our current results, impairment in contingency learning has recently been evidenced in older adults (Mutter and Williams 2004). The deficit of processing interactive contextual information seems to reflect a specific dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex that is found in healthy older subjects as well as in schizophrenic and demented patients (Cohen and Servan-Schreiber 1992;Braver and Barch 2002).…”

Aging and integration of contingency evidence in causal judgment.

“…This evidence can be represented as the absolute frequencies of the event state combinations in Cells A – D of a 2 × 2 contingency table (see Figure 1). Studies investigating causal induction through experience often focus on the acquisition of this basic contingency evidence via associative learning processes (e.g., Mutter & Williams, 2004; Shanks & Dickinson, 1987; Wasserman & Castro, 2005), whereas those investigating causal induction via descriptive sources typically focus on differences in how the contingency evidence in these four cells is weighted and the rules that are used to combine this evidence for prediction and judgment (e.g., Levin, Wasserman, & Kao, 1993; Mandel & Lehman, 1998; Schustack & Sternberg, 1981; Shaklee & Mims, 1982; Wasserman, Dorner, & Kao, 1990; White, 2003). …”

Aging and retrospective revaluation of causal learning.

“…In a generative causal contingency, outcome occurrence is more likely in the presence of the cue than in its absence and in a preventative causal contingency, outcome occurrence is more likely in the absence of the cue than in its presence. Research has consistently shown that age differences in causal learning are greater for preventative than generative causal contingencies, suggesting that older adults may have a selective deficit in their ability to acquire causal information about absent cues (Mutter, Haggbloom, Plumlee, & Schirmer, 2006; Mutter & Pliske, 1996; Mutter & Plumlee, 2009; Mutter, DiCaro, & Plumlee, 2009; Mutter & Williams, 2004). If this is the case, age differences should also be observed in other causal scenarios that require learning about absent events.…”

“…Likewise, age has a detrimental effect on implicit learning tasks such as higher-order sequence learning (e.g., Howard, Howard, Japikse, DiYanni, Thompson, & Somberg, 2004) that involve extracting complex temporal and predictive relationships between co-occurring stimuli. Given the importance of associative processes in causal learning, it seems likely that this extensive age-related associative deficit is also responsible for the changes that have been observed in older adults’ causal learning (Mutter, et al, 2006; Mutter & Pliske, 1996; Mutter & Plumlee, 2009; Mutter, et al, 2009; Mutter & Williams, 2004). …”

“…This is not the case, however, when these tasks involve absent cues. For example, providing additional learning trials and improving the contiguity between a cue and outcome produces equivalent performance for young and older adults in generative causal learning, whereas the same manipulations improve young, but not older adults’ performance in preventative causal learning (Mutter et al, 2009; Mutter & Williams, 2004). Similarly, age differences in feature positive (FP) discrimination learning (i.e., the occurrence of a distinctive feature predicts reinforcement) are eliminated after practice with FP discrimination, but these differences persist in feature negative (FN) discrimination learning (i.e., the nonoccurrence of a distinctive feature predicts reinforcement) after practice with FN discrimination (Mutter, et al, 2006).…”