Jove
Visualize
Contact Us
JoVE
x logofacebook logolinkedin logoyoutube logo
ABOUT JoVE
OverviewLeadershipBlogJoVE Help Center
AUTHORS
Publishing ProcessEditorial BoardScope & PoliciesPeer ReviewFAQSubmit
LIBRARIANS
TestimonialsSubscriptionsAccessResourcesLibrary Advisory BoardFAQ
RESEARCH
JoVE JournalMethods CollectionsJoVE Encyclopedia of ExperimentsArchive
EDUCATION
JoVE CoreJoVE BusinessJoVE Science EducationJoVE Lab ManualFaculty Resource CenterFaculty Site
Terms & Conditions of Use
Privacy Policy
Policies

Related Experiment Videos

Serial causation: occasion setting in a causal induction task.

M E Young1, J L Johnson, E A Wasserman

  • 1University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. meyoung@siu.edu

Memory & Cognition
|December 29, 2000
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Related Concept Videos

You might also read

Related Articles

Articles linked to this work by shared authors, journal, and citation graph.

Sort by
Same author

Illuminating the conceptual structure of the space of moral violations with searchlight representational similarity analysis.

NeuroImage·2017
Same author

Selective attention and pigeons' multiple necessary cues discrimination learning.

Behavioural processes·2014
Same author

Effects of number of items on the baboon's discrimination of same from different visual displays.

Animal cognition·2014
Same author

Attentional tradeoffs in the pigeon.

Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior·2014
Same author

Common versus distinctive species: On the logic of behavioral comparison.

The Behavior analyst·2012
Same author

Evidence for a conceptual account of same-different discrimination learning in the pigeon.

Psychonomic bulletin & review·2002
Same journal

The properties of personal semantics.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Music enhances associative generalization: Evidence from a memory integration task.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Video, text, and memory: An emotional verbal overshadowing effect.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Limited protective effects of multilingualism against age-related cognitive decline.

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

Validation of illustrated texts: Can pictures raise awareness of inconsistencies?

Memory & cognition·2026
Same journal

4I remember (and forget) your happy smiling face: Directed forgetting of emotionally expressive faces of in-group and out-group members.

Memory & cognition·2026
See all related articles

People adjust their expectations of a conditional cause based on an occasion setter, but only when events are presented sequentially, not simultaneously. This challenges current causal induction models.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Animal Learning
  • Causal Inference

Background:

  • Understanding how humans and animals infer causality is fundamental to cognitive science.
  • Occasion setting, a phenomenon observed in animal learning, involves a cue that modulates the predictive relationship between another cue and an outcome.
  • Existing causal induction models often struggle to fully explain complex associative learning phenomena.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the role of temporal relations and occasion setting in human causal induction.
  • To examine whether an 'occasion setter' event influences the perceived efficacy of a 'conditional cause'.
  • To test the predictions of current causal induction models against novel experimental findings.

Main Methods:

  • A causal induction task was designed to elicit occasion setting, similar to animal learning paradigms.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Participants observed events where a conditional cause was sometimes paired with an occasion setter and sometimes occurred alone.
  • The temporal presentation of events (serial vs. simultaneous) was manipulated to assess its impact on causal judgments.

    • Main Results:

    • The efficacy of the conditional cause was significantly modulated by the presence of the occasion setter.
    • Participants effectively used the occasion setter to adjust their effect expectancies when events were presented serially.
    • This modulation effect was absent when the events were presented simultaneously.

    Conclusions:

    • Temporal contiguity and the distinctiveness of cues play crucial roles in occasion setting during causal induction.
    • The findings suggest that attention and temporal processing are key mechanisms underlying this form of associative learning.
    • Current computational models of causal induction require refinement to incorporate these observed effects of temporal relations and occasion setting.