Abstract
Detecting the causal relations among environmental events is an important facet of learning. Certain variables have been identified which influence both human causal attribution and animal learning: temporal priority, temporal and spatial contiguity, covariation and contingency, and prior experience. Recent research has continued to find distinct commonalities between the influence these variables have in the two domains, supporting a neo-Humean analysis of the origins of personal causal theories. The cues to causality determine which event relationships will be judged as causal; personal causal theories emerge as a result of these judgments and in turn affect future attributions. An examination of animal learning research motivates further extensions of the analogy. Researchers are encouraged to study real-time causal attributions, to study additional methodological analogies to conditioning paradigms, and to develop rich learning accounts of the acquisition of causal theories.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allan, L. G. (1980). A note on measurement of contingency between two binary variables in judgment tasks.Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,15, 147–149.
Allan, L. G. (1993). Human contingency judgments: Rule based or associative?Psychological Bulletin,114, 435–448.
Allan, L. G., &Jenkins, H. M. (1983). The effect of representations of binary variables on judgment of influence.Learning & Motivation,14, 381–405.
Alloy, L. B., &Tabachnik, N. (1984). Assessment of covariation by humans and animals: The joint influence of prior expectations and current situational information.Psychological Review,91, 112–149.
Arkes, H. R., &Harkness, A. R. (1983). Estimates of contingency between two dichotomous variables.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,112, 117–135.
Ausubel, D. P., &Schiff, H. M. (1954). The effect of incidental and experimentally induced experience in the learning of relevant and irrelevant causal relationships by children.Journal of Genetic Psychology,84, 109–123.
Baker, A. G., Berbrier, M. W., &Vallee-Tourangeau, F. (1989). Judgments of a 2×2 contingency table: Sequential processing and the learning curve.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,41B, 65–97.
Baker, A. G., &Mackintosh, N. J. (1977). Excitatory and inhibitory conditioning following uncorrelated presentations of CS and UCS.Animal Learning & Behavior,5, 315–319.
Baker, A. G., Mercier, P., Vallee-Tourangeau, F., Frank, R., &Pan, M. (1993). Selective associations and causality judgments: Presence of a strong causal factor may reduce judgments of a weaker one.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,19, 414–432.
Benedict, J. O. (1991). Judgment of covariation in classical and instrumental conditioning contexts.Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,29, 457–459.
Benedict, J. O., &Ayres, J. B. (1972). Factors affecting conditioning in the truly random control procedure in the rat.Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology,78, 323–330.
Bindra, D., Clarke, K. A., &Shultz, T. R. (1980). Understanding predictive relations of necessity and sufficiency in formally equivalent “causal” and “logical” problems.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,109, 422–443.
Bolles, R. C., Collier, A. C., Bouton, M. E., &Marlin, N. A. (1978). Some tricks for ameliorating the trace-conditioning deficit.Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,11, 403–406.
Breland, K., &Breland, M. (1961). The misbehavior of organisms.American Psychologist,16, 681–684.
Brody, N. (1989). Unconscious learning of rules: Comment on Reber’s analysis of implicit learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,118, 236–238.
Bullock, M.(1984). Preschool children’s understanding of causal connections.British Journal of Developmental Psychology,2, 139–148.
Bullock, M., &Gelman, R. (1979). Preschool children’s assumptions about cause and effect: Temporal ordering.Child Development,50, 89–96.
Bullock, M., Gelman, R., &Baillargeon, R. (1982). The development of causal reasoning. In W. J. Friedman (Ed.),The developmental psychology of time (pp. 209–254). New York: Academic Press.
Champagne, A. B., Klopfer, L. E., &Anderson, L. H. (1980). Factors influencing the learning of classical mechanics.American Journal of Physics,48, 1074–1079.
Chapman, G. B. (1991). Trial order affects cue interaction in contingency judgment.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,17, 837–854.
Chapman, G. B., &Robbins, S. J. (1990). Cue interaction in human contingency judgment.Memory & Cognition,18, 537–545.
Cheng, P. W. (1993). Separating causal laws from causal facts: Press ing the limits of statistical relevance. In D. Medin (Ed.),The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 30, pp. 215–264). San Diego: Academic Press.
Cheng, P. W., &Novick, L. R. (1992). Covariation in natural causal induction.Psychological Review,99, 365–381.
Clement, J.(1982). Students’ preconceptions in introductory mechanics.American Journal of Physics,50, 66–71.
Desmond, J. E., &Moore, J. W. (1988). Adaptive timing in neural networks: The conditioned response.Biological Cybernetics,58, 405–415.
Dickinson, A., Shanks, D. R., &Evenden, J. L. (1984). Judgement of act-outcome contingency: The role of selective attribution.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,36A, 29–50.
Durlach, P. J. (1983). Effect of signaling intertrial unconditioned stimuli in autoshaping.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,9, 374–389.
Durlach, P. J. (1989). Learning and performance in Pavlovian conditioning: Are failures of contiguity failures of learning or performance? In S. B. Klein & R. R. Mowrer (Eds.),Contemporary learning theories: Pavlovian conditioning and the status of traditional learning theory (pp. 19–59). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Egger, M. D., &Miller, N. E. (1962). Secondary reinforcement in rats as a function of information value and reliability of the stimulus.Journal of Experimental Psychology,64, 97–104.
Einhorn, H. J., &Hogarth, R. M. (1986). Judging probable cause.Psychological Bulletin,99, 3–19.
Eysenck, M. W., &Keane, M. T. (1990).Cognitive psychology: A student’s handbook. Hove, U.K.: Erlbaum.
Garcia, J., &Koelling, R. A. (1966). Relation of cue to consequence in avoidance learning.Psychonomic Science,4, 123–124.
Gibbon, J., &Balsam, P. (1981). Spreading association in time. In C. M. Locurto, H. S. Terrace, & J. Gibbon (Eds.),Autoshaping and conditioning theory (pp. 219–253). New York: Academic Press.
Grice, G. R. (1948). The relation of secondary reinforcement to delayed reward in visual discrimination learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology,38, 1–16.
Grossberg, S., &Schmajuk, N. A. (1989). Neural dynamics of adaptive timing and temporal discrimination during associative learning.Neural Networks,2, 79–102.
Gruber, H. E., Fink, C. D., &Damm, V. (1957). Effects of experience on perception of causality.Journal of Experimental Psychology,53, 89–93.
Hall, G. (1991).Perceptual and associative learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
Hallam, S. C., Grahame, N. J., &Miller, R. R. (1992). Exploring the edges of Pavlovian contingency space: An assessment of contingency theory and its various metrics.Learning & Motivation,23, 225–249.
Hammond, L. J., &Paynter, W. E. (1983). Probabilistic contingency theories of animal conditioning: A critical analysis.Learning & Motivation,14, 527–550.
Hammond, L. J., &Weinberg, M. (1984). Signaling unearned reinforcers removes the suppression produced by a zero correlation in an operant paradigm.Animal Learning & Behavior,12, 371–377.
Harré, R., &Madden, E. H. (1975).Causal powers: A theory of natural necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Holland, J. H., Holyoak, K. J., Nisbett, R. E., &Thagard, P. (1986).Induction: Processes of inference, learning and discovery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Holland, P. C. (1986). Temporal determinants of occasion setting in feature-positive discriminations.Animal Learning & Behavior,14, 111–120.
Holland, P. C. (1989a). Feature extinction enhances transfer of occasion setting.Animal Learning & Behavior,17, 269–279.
Holland, P. C. (1989b). Occasion setting with simultaneous compounds in rats.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,15, 183–193.
Hume, D. (1969).A treatise of human nature. New York: Penguin Books. (Original work published 1739)
Kaiser, M. K., Proffitt, D. R., &McCloskey, M. (1985). The development of beliefs about falling objects.Perception & Psychophysics,38, 533–539.
Kamin, L. J. (1969). Selective association and conditioning. In N. J. Mackintosh & W. K. Honig (Eds.),Fundamental issues in associative learning (pp. 42–64). Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University Press.
Kao, S., &Wasserman, E. A. (1993). Assessment of an information integration account of contingency judgment with examination of subjective cell importance and method of information presentation.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,19, 1363–1386.
Kaplan, P. S., &Hearst, E. (1982). Bridging temporal gaps between CS and US in autoshaping: Insertion of other stimuli before, during, and after CS.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,8, 187–203.
Kehoe, E. J., Gibbs, C. M., Garcia, E., &Gormezano, I. (1979). Associative transfer and stimulus selection in classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response to serial compound CSs.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,5, 1–18.
Kehoe, E. J., Horne, P. S., Macrae, M., &Horne, A. J. (1993). Realtime processing of serial stimuli in trace conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,19, 265–283.
Kehoe, E. J., Marshall-Goodell, B., &Gormezano, I. (1987). Differential conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response to serial compound stimuli.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,13, 17–30.
Kehoe, E. J., &Napier, R. M. (1991). Real-time factors in the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response to pulsed and serial conditioned stimuli.Animal Learning & Behavior,19, 195–206.
Kehoe, E. J., Schreurs, B. G., &Graham, P. (1987). Temporal primacy overrides prior training in serial compound conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response.Animal Learning & Behavior,15, 455–464.
Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution.American Psychologist,28, 107–128.
Killeen, P. R. (1981). Learning as causal inference. In M. L. Commons & J. L. Nevin (Eds.),Quantitative analyses of behavior: Discriminative properties of reinforcement schedules (pp. 89–112). Cambridge, MA: Ballinger.
Killeen, P. R., &Smith, J. P. (1984). Perception of contingency in conditioning: Scalar timing, response bias, and erasure of memory by reinforcement.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,10, 333–345.
Koslowski, B., &Okagaki, L. (1986). Non-Humean indices of causation in problem-solving situations: Causal mechanism, analogous effects, and the status of rival alternative accounts.Child Development,57, 1100–1108.
Koslowski, B., Okagaki, L., Lorenz, C., &Umbach, D. (1989). When covariation is not enough: The role of causal mechanism, sampling method, and sample size in causal reasoning.Child Development,60, 1316–1327.
Kuhn, D., &Phelps, H. (1976). The development of children’s comprehension of causal direction.Child Development,47, 248–251.
Leslie, A. M. (1986). Getting development off the ground: Modularity and the infant’s perception of causality. In P. van Geert (Ed.),Theory building in development (pp. 405–437). Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Leslie, A. M., &Keeble, S. (1987). Do six-month old infants perceive causality?Cognition,25, 265–288.
Lewicki, P. (1986). Processing information about covariations that cannot be articulated.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,12, 135–146.
Liebetrau, A. M. (1983).Measures of association. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Lubow, R. E. (1973). Latent inhibition.Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology,79, 398–407.
Mackie, J. L. (1974).The cement of the universe: A study of causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press.
Mackintosh, N. J. (1973). Stimulus selection: Learning to ignore stimuli that predict no change in reinforcement. In R. A. Hinde & S. J. Hinde (Eds.),Constraints on learning (pp. 75–96). London: Academic Press.
Mackintosh, N. J. (1974).The psychology of animal learning. New York: Academic Press.
Mackintosh, N. J. (1977). Conditioning as the perception of causal relations. In R. E. Butts & J. Hintikka (Eds.),Foundational problems in the special sciences (pp. 241–250). Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
Matzel, L. D., Held, F. P., &Miller, R. R. (1988). Information and expression of simultaneous and backward associations: Implications for contiguity theory.Learning & Motivation,19, 317–344.
Melz, E. R., Cheng, P. W., Holyoak, K. J., &Waldmann, M. R. (1993). Cue competition in human categorization: Contingency or the Rescorla-Wagner learning rule? Comment on Shanks (1991).Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,19, 1398–1410.
Mendelson, R., &Shultz, T. R. (1976). Covariation and temporal contiguity as principles of causal inference in young children.Journal of Experimental Child Psychology,22, 408–412.
Michotte, A. (1963).The perception of causality. London: Methuen.
Miller, R. R.,Barnet, R. C., &Grahame, N. J. (in press). Assessment of the Rescorla-Wagner model.Psychological Bulletin.
Miller, R. R., &Schactman, T. R. (1985). Conditioning context as an associative baseline: Implications for response generation and the nature of conditioned inhibition. In P. D. Balsam & A. Tomie (Eds.),Information processing in animals: Conditioned inhibition (pp. 51–88). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nisbett, R. E., &Ross, L. (1980).Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Oakes, L. M., &Cohen, L. B. (1990). Infant perception of a causal event.Cognitive Development,5, 193–207.
Papini, M. R., &Bitterman, M. E. (1990). The role of contingency in classical conditioning.Psychological Review,97, 396–403.
Pavlov, I. P. (1927).Conditioned reflexes (G. V. Anrep, trans.). London: Oxford University Press.
Price, P. C., &Yates, J. F. (1993). Judgmental overshadowing: Further evidence of cue interaction in contingency judgment.Memory & Cognition,21, 561–572.
Reber, A. S. (1989). Implicit learning and tacit knowledge.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,118, 219–235.
Reed, P. (1992). Effect of a signalled delay between an action and outcome on human judgement of causality.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,44B, 81–100.
Reed, P., &Reilly, S. (1990). Context extinction following conditioning with delayed reward enhances subsequent instrumental responding.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,16, 48–55.
Rescorla, R. A. (1967). Pavlovian conditioning and its proper control procedures.Psychological Review,74, 71–80.
Rescorla, R. A. (1982). Effect of a stimulus intervening between CS and US in autoshaping.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,8, 131–141.
Rescorla, R. A. (1987). A Pavlovian analysis of goal-directed behavior.American Psychologist,42, 119–129.
Rescorla, R. A., &Cunningham, C. L. (1979). Spatial contiguity facilitates Pavlovian second-order conditioning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,5, 152–161.
Rescorla, R. A., &Solomon, R. L. (1967). Two-process learning theory: Relationships between Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning.Psychological Review,74, 151–182.
Rescorla, R. A., &Wagner, A. R. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian conditioning: Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black & W. F. Prokasy (Eds.),Classical conditioning II: Current research and theory (pp. 64–99). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Rosenfarb, I. S., Newland, M. C., Brannon, S. E., &Howey, D. S. (1992). Effects of self-generated rules on the development of schedulecontrolled behavior.Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,58, 107–121.
Schlottmann, A., &Shanks, D. R. (1992). Evidence for a distinction between judged and perceived causality.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,44A, 321–342.
Shaklee, H. (1983). Human covariation judgment: Accuracy and strategy.Learning & Motivation,14, 433–448.
Shaklee, H., &Elek, S. (1988). Cause and covariate: Development of two related concepts.Cognitive Development,3, 1–13.
Shaklee, H., &Mims, M. (1981). Development of rule use in judgments of covariation between events.Child Development,52, 317–325.
Shaklee, H., &Tucker, D. (1980). A rule analysis of judgments of covariation between events.Memory & Cognition,8, 459–467.
Shanks, D. R. (1985). Forward and backward blocking in human contingency judgment.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,37B, 1–21.
Shanks, D. R. (1989). Selectional processes in causality judgment.Memory & Cognition,17, 27–34.
Shanks, D. R. (1991). Categorization by a connectionist network.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,17, 433–443.
Shanks, D. R. (1993a). Associative versus contingency accounts of category learning: Reply to Melz, Cheng, Holyoak, and Waldmann (1993).Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,19, 1411–1423.
Shanks, D. R. (1993b). Human instrumental learning: A critical review of data and theory.British Journal of Psychology,84, 319–354.
Shanks, D. R., &Dickinson, A. (1987). Associative accounts of causality judgment. In G. H. Bower (Ed.),The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 21, pp. 229–261). San Diego: Academic Press.
Shanks, D. R., Pearson, S. M., &Dickinson, A. (1989). Temporal contiguity and the judgement of causality by human subjects.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,41B, 139–159.
Shultz, T. R. (1982). Rules of causal attribution.Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development,47(1, Serial No. 194).
Shultz, T. R., Altmann, E., &Asselin, J. (1986). Judging causal priority.British Journal of Developmental Psychology,4, 67–74.
Shultz, T. R., &Kestenbaum, N. R. (1985). Causal reasoning in children.Annals of Child Development,2, 195–249.
Shultz, T. R., &Mendelson, R. (1975). The use of covariation as a principle of causal analysis.Child Development,46, 394–399.
Shustack, M. W., &Sternberg, R. J. (1981). Evaluation of evidence in causal inference.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,110, 101–120.
Siegler, R. S., &Liebert, R. M. (1974). Effects of contiguity, regularity and age on children’s causal inference.Developmental Psychology,10, 574–579.
Smith, M. C., Coleman, S. R., &Gormezano, I. (1969). Classical conditioning of the rabbit’s nictitating membrane response at backward, simultaneous, and forward CS-US intervals.Journal of Comparative & Physiological Psychology,69, 226–231.
Sophian, C., &Huber, A. (1984). Early developments in children’s causal judgments.Child Development,55, 512–526.
Spetch, M. L., Wilkie, D. M., &Pinel, J. P. J. (1981). Backward conditioning: A reevaluation of the empirical evidence.Psychological Bulletin,89, 163–175.
Suppes, P. (1970).A probabilistic theory of causality. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Suppes, P. (1984).Probabilistic metaphysics. New York: Blackwell.
Sutton, R. S., &Barto, A. G. (1981). Toward a modern theory of adaptive networks: Expectation and prediction.Psychological Review,88, 135–170.
Testa, T. J. (1975). Effects of similarity of location and temporal intensity pattern of conditioned and unconditioned stimuli on the acquisition of conditioned suppression in rats.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes,104, 114–121.
Thorndike, E. L. (1932).The fundamentals of learning. New York: Macmillan.
Trapold, M. A., &Overmier, J. B. (1972). The second learning process in instrumental learning. In A. A. Black & W. F. Prokasy (Eds.),Classical conditioning II: Current research and theory (pp. 427–452). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Van Hamme, L. J., Kao, S.-F., &Wasserman, E. A. (1993). Judging interevent relations: From cause to effect and from effect to cause.Memory & Cognition,21, 802–808.
Van Hamme, L. J., Ŵasserman, E. A. (1993). Cue competition in causality judgments: The role of manner of information presentation.Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society,31, 457–460.
Van Hamme, L. J., &Wasserman, E. A. (1994). Cue competition in causality judgments: The role of nonpresentation of compound stimulus elements.Learning & Motivation,25, 127–151.
Wagner, A. R. (1969). Stimulus selection and a “modified continuity theory.” In G. H. Bower & J. T. Spence (Eds.),The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 3, pp. 1–41). New York: Academic Press.
Wagner, A. R., &Terry, W. S. (1975). Backward conditioning to a CS following an expected vs. a surprising UCS.Animal Learning & Behavior,3, 370–374.
Waldmann, M. R., &Holyoak, K. J. (1992). Predictive and diagnostic learning within causal models: Asymmetries in cue competition.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,121, 222–236.
Ward, W. C., &Jenkins, H. M. (1965). The display of information and the judgment of contingency.Canadian Journal of Psychology,19, 231–241.
Wasserman, E. A. (1990a). Attribution of causality to common and distinctive elements of compound stimuli.Psychological Science,1, 298–302.
Wasserman, E. A. (1990b). Detecting response-outcome relations: Toward an understanding of the causal structure of the environment. In G. H. Bower (Ed.),The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 26, pp. 27–82). San Diego: Academic Press.
Wasserman, E. A., Elek, S. M., Chatlosh, D. L., &Baker, A. G. (1993). Rating causal relations: Role of probability in judgments of response-outcome contingency.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,19, 174–188.
Wasserman, E. A., &Neunaber, D. J. (1986). College students’ responding to and rating of contingency relations: The role of temporal contiguity.Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,46, 15–35.
Wasserman, E. A., &Shaklee, H. (1984). Judging response-outcome relations: The role of response-outcome contingency, outcome probability, and method of information presentation.Memory & Cognition,12, 270–286.
White, P. A. (1989). A theory of causal processing.British Journal of Psychology,80, 431–454.
White, P. A. (1992). Causal powers, causal questions, and the place of regularity in causal attribution.British Journal of Psychology,83, 161–188.
Williams, D. A., Sagness, K. E., &McPhee, J. E. (1994). Configural and elemental strategies in predictive learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,20, 694–709.
Yates, J. F., &Curley, S. P. (1986). Contingency judgment: Primacy effects and attention decrement.Acta Psychologica,62, 293–302.
Young, M. E. (1992). A simple recurrent network model of serial conditioning: Implications for temporal event representation. InProceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1164–1169). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Young, M. E., &Bailey, T. M. (1994). Event prediction: Faster learning in a layered Hebbian network with memory. In M. C. Mozer, P. Smolensky, D. S. Touretzky, J. L. Elman, & A. S. Weigend (Eds.),Proceedings of the 1993 Connectionist Models Summer School (pp. 245–252). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Young, M. E., &DeBauche, B. (1993). Causal mechanisms as temporal bridges in a connectionist model of causal attribution. InProceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1092–1097). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Preparation of this article was supported by the University of Minnesota Center for Research on Learning, Perception, and Cognition, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-07151). I would like to thank Randy Fletcher, Bruce Overmier, Paul van den Broek, and four anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Young, M.E. On the origin of personal causal theories. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2, 83–104 (1995). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214413
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03214413