Abstract
Two experiments investigated the joint influence of statistical and temporal information on causal inference from tabular data. Participants were presented with unambiguous data sets containing information about relative effect frequencies in cause-present and cause-absent situations. In addition to contingency information, the stimuli also revealed information about the temporal distribution of effects. The participants took this information into account when making causal judgments, so that the mere advancing or postponing of the effect in time was attached with causal significance, even when the cause did not increase the overall probability of the effect. These results cannot be reconciled with standard contingency accounts of causal induction.
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This article has been developed from W.J.G.’s final-year research project under the supervision of M.J.B. This article was written while M.J.B. was on study leave at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich.
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Greville, W.J., Buehner, M.J. The influence of temporal distributions on causal induction from tabular data. Memory & Cognition 35, 444–453 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193284
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193284