Causal learning with delays up to 21 hours

Zhang, Yiwen; Rottman, Benjamin M.

doi:10.3758/s13423-023-02342-x

Psychon Bull Rev

2023

DOI: 10.3758/s13423-023-02342-x

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Causal learning with delays up to 21 hours

Yiwen Zhang

Benjamin M. Rottman

Abstract: Considerable delays between causes and effects are commonly found in real life. However, previous studies have only investigated how well people can learn probabilistic relations with delays on the order of seconds. In the current study we tested whether people can learn a cause-effect relation with delays of 0, 3, 9, or 21 hours, and the study lasted 16 days. Surprisingly, we found that participants were able to learn the causal relation about equally as well in all four conditions. These findings demonstrate… Show more

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2024

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Cited by 2 publications

References 59 publications

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Causal and Chronological Relationships Predict Memory Organization for Nonlinear Narratives

Antony,

Lozano,

Dhoat

et al. 2024

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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While recounting an experience, one could employ multiple strategies to transition from one part to the next. For instance, if the event was learned out of linear order, one could recall events according to the time they were learned (temporal), similar events (semantic), events occurring nearby in time (chronological), or events produced by the current event (causal). To disentangle the importance of these factors, we had participants watch the nonlinear narrative, “Memento,” under different task instructions and presentation orders. For each scene of the film, we also separately computed semantic and causal networks. From these derivations, we contrasted the evidence for temporal, semantic, chronological, or causal strategies during recall. Critically, there was stronger evidence for the causal and chronological strategies than semantic or temporal strategies. Moreover, the causal and chronological strategies outperformed the temporal one even after asking participants to recall the film in the presented order, underscoring the fundamental nature of causal structure in scaffolding understanding and organizing recall. Nevertheless, time still marginally predicted recall transitions, suggesting it still operates as a weak signal in the presence of more salient forms of structure. In addition, semantic and causal network properties predicted scene memorability, including showing a stronger role for causes of an event than its outgoing effects. In summary, these effects highlight the importance of accounting for complex, causal networks in knowledge building and memory.

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Causal and Chronological Relationships Predict Memory Organization for Nonlinear Narratives

Antony,

Lozano,

Dhoat

et al. 2024

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

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The Paradox of Time in Dynamic Causal Systems

Davis

Bramley

Rehder

2022

Entropy

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Recent work has shown that people use temporal information including order, delay, and variability to infer causality between events. In this study, we build on this work by investigating the role of time in dynamic systems, where causes take continuous values and also continually influence their effects. Recent studies of learning in these systems explored short interactions in a setting with rapidly evolving dynamics and modeled people as relying on simpler, resource-limited strategies to grapple with the stream of information. A natural question that arises from such an account is whether interacting with systems that unfold more slowly might reduce the systematic errors that result from these strategies. Paradoxically, we find that slowing the task indeed reduced the frequency of one type of error, albeit at the cost of increasing the overall error rate. To explain these results we posit that human learners analyze continuous dynamics into discrete events and use the observed relationships between events to draw conclusions about causal structure. We formalize this intuition in terms of a novel Causal Event Abstraction model and show that this model indeed captures the observed pattern of errors. We comment on the implications these results have for causal cognition.

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Causal learning with delays up to 21 hours

Cited by 2 publications

References 59 publications

Causal and Chronological Relationships Predict Memory Organization for Nonlinear Narratives

Causal and Chronological Relationships Predict Memory Organization for Nonlinear Narratives

The Paradox of Time in Dynamic Causal Systems

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