Abstract

Are human contingency judgments based on associationistic principles such as cue competition or on normative principles as specified by rational-cognitive models? In this study, participants learned to predict an outcome from several simultaneously presented cues. They were asked to judge the cues in regard to causal power or statistical concepts such as probability or relative frequency. Uniform application of associationistic principles implies cue-interaction effects of blocking (Experiment 1) and conditioned inhibition (Experiment 2) for all judgments. A rational-cognitive framework predicts cueinteraction effects for causality judgments, but not for probability and relative frequency judgments. The results support the rational-cognitive framework on all accounts.

Citations