The role of age and prior beliefs in contingency judgment

Age-related differences in temporal binding and the influence of action body parts

If voluntary action is followed by an effect with a short time delay, the time interval between action and effect is often perceived to be shorter than it actually is. This perceptual time compression is termed intentional binding or temporal binding. We investigated age-related changes in adulthood considering temporal binding and its dependence on action body parts (i.e., hand vs. foot). This experiment included 17 young adults (mean age: 21.71 ± 3.14 years) and 27 older adults (mean age: 74.41 ± 3.38 years). Participants performed a button press task using their index fingers (hand condition) or toes (foot condition). The results showed that older participants exhibited a strong time compression comparable to young participants in the voluntary condition. Older participants also showed a strong time compression in involuntary action, which was induced by a mechanical device, differently from young participants. In line with previous research, the present age-related differences in time compression considering involuntary action suggest that causal belief significantly influences event perception rather than the associated intention of action or sensory afferents. The present results also suggest that the nature of action body parts has no significant influence on temporal binding, independent of age group.

Causal illusions in the classroom: how the distribution of student outcomes can promote false instructional beliefs

Teachers sometimes believe in the efficacy of instructional practices that have little empirical support. These beliefs have proven difficult to efface despite strong challenges to their evidentiary basis. Teachers typically develop causal beliefs about the efficacy of instructional practices by inferring their effect on students’ academic performance. Here, we evaluate whether causal inferences about instructional practices are susceptible to an outcome density effect using a contingency learning task. In a series of six experiments, participants were ostensibly presented with students’ assessment outcomes, some of whom had supposedly received teaching via a novel technique and some of whom supposedly received ordinary instruction. The distributions of the assessment outcomes was manipulated to either have frequent positive outcomes (high outcome density condition) or infrequent positive outcomes (low outcome density condition). For both continuous and categorical assessment outcomes, participants in the high outcome density condition rated the novel instructional technique as effective, despite the fact that it either had no effect or had a negative effect on outcomes, while the participants in the low outcome density condition did not. These results suggest that when base rates of performance are high, participants may be particularly susceptible to drawing inaccurate inferences about the efficacy of instructional practices.

Impact of uncertainty and ambiguous outcome phrasing on moral decision-making

The literature has shown that different types of moral dilemmas elicit discrepant decision patterns. The present research investigated the role of uncertainty in contributing to these decision patterns. Two studies were conducted to examine participants' choices in commonly used dilemmas. Study 1 showed that participants' perceived outcome probabilities were significantly associated with their moral choices, and that these associations were independent from the dilemma type. Study 2 revealed that participants had significantly less preference for killing the individual when the outcome probabilities were stated using the modal verb 'will' than when they were stated using the numerical phrasing of '100%'. Our findings illustrate a discord between experimenter and participant in the interpretation of task instructions.

Causal illusions in children when the outcome is frequent

Causal illusions occur when people perceive a causal relation between two events that are actually unrelated. One factor that has been shown to promote these mistaken beliefs is the outcome probability. Thus, people tend to overestimate the strength of a causal relation when the potential consequence (i.e. the outcome) occurs with a high probability (outcome-density bias). Given that children and adults differ in several important features involved in causal judgment, including prior knowledge and basic cognitive skills, developmental studies can be considered an outstanding approach to detect and further explore the psychological processes and mechanisms underlying this bias. However, the outcome density bias has been mainly explored in adulthood, and no previous evidence for this bias has been reported in children. Thus, the purpose of this study was to extend outcome-density bias research to childhood. In two experiments, children between 6 and 8 years old were exposed to two similar setups, both showing a non-contingent relation between the potential cause and the outcome. These two scenarios differed only in the probability of the outcome, which could either be high or low. Children judged the relation between the two events to be stronger in the high probability of the outcome setting, revealing that, like adults, they develop causal illusions when the outcome is frequent.

Individual Difference Factors in the Learning and Transfer of Patterning Discriminations

In an associative patterning task, some people seem to focus more on learning an overarching rule, whereas others seem to focus on acquiring specific relations between the stimuli and outcomes involved. Building on earlier work, we further investigated which cognitive factors are involved in feature- vs. rule-based learning and generalization. To this end, we measured participants' tendency to generalize according to the rule of opposites after training on negative and positive patterning problems (i.e., A+/B+/AB- and C-/D-/CD+), their tendency to attend to global aspects or local details of stimuli, their systemizing disposition and their score on the Raven intelligence test. Our results suggest that while intelligence might have some influence on patterning learning and generalization, visual processing style and systemizing disposition do not. We discuss our findings in the light of previous observations on patterning.

Adapting to an Uncertain World: Cognitive Capacity and Causal Reasoning with Ambiguous Observations

Ambiguous causal evidence in which the covariance of the cause and effect is partially known is pervasive in real life situations. Little is known about how people reason about causal associations with ambiguous information and the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This paper presents three experiments exploring the cognitive mechanisms of causal reasoning with ambiguous observations. Results revealed that the influence of ambiguous observations manifested by missing information on causal reasoning depended on the availability of cognitive resources, suggesting that processing ambiguous information may involve deliberative cognitive processes. Experiment 1 demonstrated that subjects did not ignore the ambiguous observations in causal reasoning. They also had a general tendency to treat the ambiguous observations as negative evidence against the causal association. Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 included a causal learning task requiring a high cognitive demand in which paired stimuli were presented to subjects sequentially. Both experiments revealed that processing ambiguous or missing observations can depend on the availability of cognitive resources. Experiment 2 suggested that the contribution of working memory capacity to the comprehensiveness of evidence retention was reduced when there were ambiguous or missing observations. Experiment 3 demonstrated that an increase in cognitive demand due to a change in the task format reduced subjects’ tendency to treat ambiguous-missing observations as negative cues.

Influences of Age and Emotion on Source Guessing: Are Older Adults More Likely to Show Fear-Relevant Illusory Correlations?

OBJECTIVES

The present study investigates age differences in the vulnerability to illusory correlations between fear-relevant stimuli and threatening information.

METHOD

Younger and older adults saw pictures of threatening snakes and nonthreatening fish, paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information ("poisonous" and "nonpoisonous") with a null contingency between animal type and poisonousness. In a source monitoring test, participants were required to remember whether an animal was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. Illusory correlations were implicitly measured via a multinomial model. One advantage of this approach is that memory and guessing processes can be assessed independently. An illusory correlation would be reflected in a higher probability of guessing that a snake rather than a fish was poisonous if the poisonousness of the animal was not remembered.

RESULTS

Older adults showed evidence of illusory correlations in source guessing while younger adults did not; instead they showed evidence of probability matching. Moreover, snake fear was associated with increased vulnerability to illusory correlations in older adults.

DISCUSSION

The findings confirm that older adults are more susceptible to fear-relevant illusory correlations than younger adults.

Age differences in contingency judgement linked to perceptual segregation

We demonstrate large differences in judging positive and null contingencies between younger and older adults with a task commonly used to explore cue competition in both contingency and causality judgements. The one-phase blocking task uses two cues, with separate contingencies with the same outcome. The age differences persisted even when participants knew in advance which of the two contingencies to judge. The age differences disappeared, however, when the stimulus display contained markers aiding perceptual segregation. We suggest that the age differences elicited in the one-phase blocking task are linked to decrements in perceptual segregation.

Ecological rationality: a framework for understanding and aiding the aging decision maker

The notion of ecological rationality sees human rationality as the result of the adaptive fit between the human mind and the environment. Ecological rationality focuses the study of decision making on two key questions: First, what are the environmental regularities to which people’s decision strategies are matched, and how frequently do these regularities occur in natural environments? Second, how well can people adapt their use of specific strategies to particular environmental regularities? Research on aging suggests a number of changes in cognitive function, for instance, deficits in learning and memory that may impact decision-making skills. However, it has been shown that simple strategies can work well in many natural environments, which suggests that age-related deficits in strategy use may not necessarily translate into reduced decision quality. Consequently, we argue that predictions about the impact of aging on decision performance depend not only on how aging affects decision-relevant capacities but also on the decision environment in which decisions are made. In sum, we propose that the concept of the ecological rationality is crucial to understanding and aiding the aging decision maker.

Aging and integration of contingency evidence in causal judgment

Age differences in causal judgment are consistently greater for preventative/negative relationships than for generative/positive relationships. In this study, a feature analytic procedure (Mandel & Lehman, 1998) was used to determine whether this effect might be due to differences in young and older adults' integration of contingency evidence during causal induction. To reduce the impact of age-related changes in learning/memory, the authors presented contingency evidence for preventative, noncontingent, and generative relationships in summary form; the meaningfulness of causal context was varied to induce participants to integrate greater or lesser amounts of this evidence. Young adults showed greater flexibility in their integration processes than did older adults. In an abstract causal context, there were no age differences in causal judgment or integration, but in meaningful contexts, young adults' judgments for preventative relationships were more accurate than older adults' and young adults assigned more weight to the contingency evidence confirming these relationships. These differences were mediated by age-related changes in processing speed. The decline in this basic cognitive resource may place boundaries on the amount or type of evidence that older adults can integrate for causal judgment.

The role of contingency and contiguity in young and older adults' causal learning

Contingency and temporal contiguity are important "cues to causality." In this study, we examined how aging influences the use of this information in response-outcome causal learning. Young and older adults judged a generative causal contingency (i.e., outcome is more likely when a response is made) to be stronger when response and outcome were contiguous than when the outcome was delayed. Contiguity had a similar beneficial effect on young adults' preventative causal learning (i.e., outcome is less likely when a response is made). However, older adults did not judge the preventative relationship to be stronger when the response and outcome were separated by a short delay or when the outcome immediately followed their response. These findings point to a fundamental age-related decline in the acquisition of preventative causal contingencies that may be due to changes in the utilization of cues for the retrieval of absent events.