How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence of delay on adult human causal judgments is mediated by experimentally induced assumptions about the timeframe of the causal relation in question, as suggested by Einhorn & Hogarth (1986). Causal judgments generally decreased when a delay separated cause and effect. This decrease was less pronounced when the thematic context of the causal relation induced participants to expect a delay. Experiment 3 ruled out an alternative explanation of the effect based on variations of cue and outcome saliencies, and showed that detrimental effects of delay are reduced even more when instructions explicitly mentioned the timeframe of the causal relation in question. Knowledge thus mediates the impact of

Blocking effects and associations Contiguity or the pairing of events has long been recognized by learning theorists as insufficient to explain basic associative processes. In 1968, Leon Kamin described the blocking phenomenon as a demonstration of this insufficiency (Kamin, 1968). Using a two-phase design, as shown in Table 4.1, Kamin conditioned a group of animals to associate a single cue with an outcome (i.e., A Æ O). In Phase 2, a second cue was paired alongside the first (i.e., AB Æ O). A second group of animals were only exposed to the latter phase. Despite the extensive pairing of Cue B and the outcome, Group 1 learned very little about B compared to Group 2 (and other relevant control groups). The initial training with A blocked conditioning to the superimposed cue and resulted in an attenuated response to B at test. Assessing (in)sensitivity to causal asymmetry 103