Cue competition in causality judgments: The role of manner of information presentation

Abstract

College students rated the causal efficacy of elements X, A, and B of food compounds AX and BX in producing the allergic reaction of a hypothetical patient. Causal ratings were made for each food after subjects received all of the results of a I6-day allergy test. With both serial and simultaneous presentation of information, ratings of distinctive elements A and B diverged and ratings of common element X decreased as the difference between the correlation of AX and BX with the allergic reaction increased. These human diagnostic judgments closely correspond with stimulus selection effects observed in the conditioned responses of animals in associative learning studies.

Causal beliefs and conditioned responses: Retrospective revaluation induced by experience and by instruction.

“…In the present experiment, instructed differentiation was observed when the instructions were in the form of trial-by-trial event information, suggesting that participants were able to assimilate information over repeated Gϩ and EϪ trials so as to generate propositional knowledge concerning the association between these colors and shock. Thus, the present experiment extends the results of Van Hamme and Wasserman (1993) from causal judgment to autonomic conditioning.…”

“…This prediction was tested in Experiment 2. Following the procedure described by Van Hamme and Wasserman (1993), information about the occurrence of colors and shock on each of the training trials in the revaluation task was presented on a printed information sheet. In a subsequent test phase, shock-expectancy ratings and skin-conductance responses were recorded while the participants were presented with the actual colors that had been described in the instructional phase.…”

Fighting the illusion of control: How to make use of cue competition and alternative explanations

“…Many researchers have argued that the psychological processes responsible for causal learning might vary depending on the way information is presented. For example, when people are given information about the covariation between a cause and an effect, whether this information is provided in a summary table or directly experienced in a series of trials, makes a difference in their ability to detect the cause-effect contingency (Shanks, 1991;Vallée-Tourangeau, Payton & Murphy, 2008;Waldmann & Hagmayer, 2001;Ward & Jenkins, 1965; but see Van Hamme & Wasserman, 1993). Thus, previous failures to reduce the illusion of control by alerting participants about the potential role of alternative causes (e.g., Matute, Vadillo, Vegas et al, 2007) might have been due to the fact that participants were not provided with direct experience on the presence and absence of the alternative cause during their attempts to control the target event.…”

Reasoning about redundant and non-redundant alternative causes of a single outcome: Blocking or enhancement caused by the stronger cause

“…This question is particularly interesting when people observe more than one potential cause of the same outcome, and are not permitted to independently observe the influence of each cause. Many experiments with humans and animals show that learning the correlation between a cause, or a cue, and a subsequent effect or outcome is influenced by other, concurrently, presented cues that predict the outcome (Baetu, Baker, Darredeau, & Murphy, 2005; Baker, Mercier, Vallée-Tourangeau, Frank, & Pan, 1993; Dickinson, Shanks, & Evenden, 1984; Kamin, 1969; Shanks, 1985; Van Hamme & Wasserman, 1993, 1994; Wagner, Logan, Haberlandt & Price, 1968). These findings show that a simple or unconditional correlation between a potential cause and an effect is not sufficient to infer a causal relationship.…”