Frequency of judgment as a context-like determinant of predictive judgments

Several studies have shown that predictive and causal judgments vary depending on whether the question used to assess the relationship between events is presented after each piece of information or only after all the available information has been observed. This effect could be understood by assuming that in the two cases people perceive that the test question requires that different sets of evidence be taken into account. This hypothesis is tested in the present experiments through contextual manipulations that take place at the time of training and at the time of test. Our results show that people use this contextual information to infer which set of events should be considered when making their subjective assessments. The results are at odds with current theoretical approaches, but it is possible to develop mechanisms that would allow these models to account for the observed evidence.