The concordance between performance and judgements of the causal effectiveness of an instrumental action suggests that such actions are mediated by causal knowledge. Although causal learning exhibits many associative phenomena—blocking, inhibitory or preventative learning, and super-learning—judgements of the causal status of a cue can be changed retrospectively as a result of learning episodes that do not directly involve the cue. In order to explain retrospective revaluation, a modi®ed associative theory is described in which the learning processes for retrieved cue representations are the opposite to those for presented cues, and this theory is evaluated by studies of the role of within-compound associations in retrospective revaluation and blocking. However, this modi®ed theory only applies when the within-compound association represents a contiguous rather than a causal cue relationship. Causal learning and representation is a fundamental form of cognition, if not the fundamental form. Without the capacity to learn about and represent the causal relationships between our actions and their consequences, the mind would be radically disconnected from the world. However detailed and rich our knowledge, however sophisticated and complex our inferences and planning, cognition would be impotent if our thoughts could not be

We draw together and develop previous timing models for a broad range of conditioning phenomena to reveal their common conceptual foundations: First, conditioning depends on the learning of the temporal intervals between events and the reciprocals of these intervals, the rates of event occurrence. Second, remembered intervals and rates translate into observed behavior through decision processes whose structure is adapted to noise in the decision variables. The noise and the uncertainties consequent upon it have both subjective and objective origins. A third feature of these models is their time-scale invariance, which we argue is a deeply important property evident in the available experimental data. This conceptual framework is similar to the psychophysical conceptual framework in which contemporary models of sensory processing are rooted. We contrast it with the associative conceptual framework.

Within-compound associations in retrospective revaluation and in direct learning: A challenge for comparator theory