Momentary and integrative response strategies in causal judgment

Associative models of causal learning predict recency effects: Judgments at the end of a trial series should be strongly biased by recently presented information. Prior research, however, presents a contrasting picture of human performance. López, Shanks, Almaraz, and Fernández (1998) observed recency, whereas Dennis and Ahn (2001) found the opposite, primacy. Here we replicate both of these effects and provide an explanation for this paradox. Four experiments show that the effect of trial order on judgments is a function of judgment frequency, where incremental judgments lead to recency while single final judgments abolish recency and lead instead to integration of information across trials (i.e., primacy). These results challenge almost all existing accounts of causal judgment. We propose a modified associative account in which participants can base their causal judgments either on current associative strength (momentary strategy) or on the cumulative change in associative strength since the previous judgment (integrative strategy).

[1]  R. Rescorla,et al.  A theory of Pavlovian conditioning : Variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement and nonreinforcement , 1972 .

[2]  Daniel Kahneman,et al.  Availability: A heuristic for judging frequency and probability , 1973 .

[3]  H. M. Jenkins,et al.  The Judgment of Contingency and the Nature of the Response Alternatives , 1980 .

[4]  H. Shaklee,et al.  A rule analysis of judgments of covariation between events , 1980, Memory & cognition.

[5]  A. Dickinson,et al.  Judgement of Act-Outcome Contingency: The Role of Selective Attribution , 1984 .

[6]  J. Yates,et al.  Contingency Judgment: Primacy Effects and Attention Decrement * , 1985 .

[7]  R. Hastie,et al.  The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line , 1986 .

[8]  J. Pearce.  A model for stimulus generalization in Pavlovian conditioning. , 1987, Psychological review.

[9]  Ralph R. Miller,et al.  Memory for associative history of a conditioned stimulus , 1987 .

[10]  R. Hogarth,et al.  Order effects in belief updating: The belief-adjustment model , 1992, Cognitive Psychology.

[11]  E. Wasserman,et al.  Cue Competition in Causality Judgments: The Role of Nonpresentation of Compound Stimulus Elements , 1994 .

[12]  John R. Anderson,et al.  Causal inferences as perceptual judgments , 1995, Memory & cognition.

[13]  P. Cheng.  From covariation to causation: A causal power theory. , 1997 .

[14]  A. Maldonado,et al.  The effect of frequency of judgement and the type of trials on covariation learning. , 1998 .

[15]  David R. Shanks,et al.  Effects of Trial Order on Contingency Judgments: A Comparison of Associative and Probabilistic Contrast Accounts , 1998 .

[16]  W. Ahn,et al.  Primacy in causal strength judgments: The effect of initial evidence for generative versus inhibitory relationships , 2001, Memory & cognition.

[17]  David R. Shanks,et al.  Normative and Descriptive Accounts of the Influence of Power and Contingency on Causal Judgement , 2003, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology. A, Human experimental psychology.