Abstract
Waldmann and Holyoak (1992) presented evidence in support of the claim that cue selection does not emerge in “diagnostic” human learning tasks in which the cues are interpretable as effects and the outcomes as the causes of those effects. Waldmann and Holyoak argued that this evidence presents a major difficulty for associationist theories of learning and instead supports a “causal model” theory. We identify a number of flaws in Waldmann and Holyoak’s experimental procedures and report three new experiments designed to test their claim. In Experiment 1, cue selection was observed regardless of causal order and regardless of whether the cues were abstractly or concretely specified. In Experiments 2 and 3, cue selection was again observed when subjects predicted causes from effects. We conclude that our results are consistent with simple associationist theories of learning but contradict Waldmann and Holyoak’s causal model theory.
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The research described here was supported in part by a project grant from the United Kingdom Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council to D.R.S. and a predoctoral fellowship from the Junta de Andalucia to F.J.L.
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Shanks, D.R., Lopez, F.J. Causal order does not affect cue selection in human associative learning. Mem Cogn 24, 511–522 (1996). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200939
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200939