Rethinking temporal contiguity and the judgement of causality: Effects of prior knowledge, experience, and reinforcement procedure
Rethinking temporal contiguity and the judgement of causality: Effects of prior knowledge, experience, and reinforcement procedure
复制标题
DOI：
10.1080/02724980244000675
复制
发表时间：
2003-07-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
May, J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Buehner, MJ;May, J
时间在因果推理中起着关键作用。尽管如此，大多数当代的因果归纳理论并没有解决时间连续性和延迟的影响，联想学习理论除外。Shanks，Pearson，and Dickinson（1989）和几个重复的实验（Reed，1992，1999）已经证明，如果原因和结果之间的间隔超过两秒，人们就无法识别因果关系。根据联想主义的观点，这些发现被解释为时间滞后普遍损害因果归纳。这种解释与日常因果认知的丰富性相冲突，在日常因果认知中，人们显然可以推理出涉及相当大延迟的因果关系。我们从计算的角度来看，因果延迟的影响，并预测，延迟一般会阻碍推理性能，但这种阻碍应该得到缓解，如果推理机有知识的延迟。两个实验表明：（1）延迟对因果判断的影响取决于参与者对因果关系时间框架的预期;（2）先前研究中使用的自由操作程序不适合研究延迟对因果归纳的直接影响，因为它们混淆了延迟与所讨论的关系的较弱证据。当代因果学习理论的影响进行了讨论。
Time plays a pivotal role in causal inference. Nonetheless most contemporary theories of causal induction do not address the implications of temporal contiguity and delay, with the exception of associative learning theory. Shanks, Pearson, and Dickinson (1989) and several replications (Reed, 1992, 1999) have demonstrated that people fail to identify causal relations if cause and effect are separated by more than two seconds. In line with an associationist perspective, these findings have been interpreted to indicate that temporal lags universally impair causal induction. This interpretation clashes with the richness of everyday causal cognition where people apparently can reason about causal relations involving considerable delays. We look at the implications of cause-effect delays from a computational perspective and predict that delays should generally hinder reasoning performance, but that this hindrance should be alleviated if reasoners have knowledge of the delay. Two experiments demonstrated that (1) the impact of delay on causal judgement depends on participants' expectations about the timeframe of the causal relation, and (2) the free-operant procedures used in previous studies are ill-suited to study the direct influences of delay on causal induction, because they confound delay with weaker evidence for the relation in question. Implications for contemporary causal learning theories are discussed.