On the role of causal intervention in multiple-cue judgment: positive and negative effects on learning

Previous studies have suggested better learning when people actively intervene rather than when they passively observe the stimuli in a judgment task. In 4 experiments, the authors investigated the hypothesis that this improvement is associated with a shift from exemplar memory to cue abstraction. In a multiple-cue judgment task with continuous cues, the data replicated the improvement with intervention and participants who experimented more actively produced more accurate judgments. In a multiple-cue judgment task with binary cues, intervention produced poorer accuracy and participants who experimented more actively produced poorer judgments. These results provide no support for a representational shift but suggest that the improvement with active intervention may be limited to certain tasks and environments.