Predictive validity in human causal judgement and Pavlovian conditioning

This paper first reviews the research on predictive validity in animal conditioning, and the informational theories deriving from this research. The major section of the paper examines the role of predictive validity, and thus the applicability of informational theories, in two major human learning paradigms: causal judgement and Pavlovian conditioning. There is more empirical support for informational theories in the causal judgement literature than in the conditioning literature. It is argued that judgement of predictive or causal relationships in humans is governed by processes similar to those governing conditioning in animals, and that the question of whether the same processes operate in human conditioning has not yet been adequately tested. Such a test would require joint measurement of predictive judgements and conditioned responding in a design which manipulates predictive validity independently of contiguity; it may also require a task which explicitly or implicitly restricts predictive judgements to the experimentally designated stimuli.