Causal learning with delays up to 21 hours

Considerable delays between causes and effects are commonly found in real life. However, previous studies have only investigated how well people can learn probabilistic relations with delays on the order of seconds. In the current study we tested whether people can learn a cause-effect relation with delays of 0, 3, 9, or 21 hours, and the study lasted 16 days. We found that learning was slowed with longer delays, but by the end of 16 days participants had learned the cause-effect relation in all four conditions, and they had learned the relation about equally well in all four conditions. This suggests that in real-world situations people may still be fairly accurate at inferring cause-effect relations with delays if they have enough experience. We also discuss ways that delays may interact with other real-world factors that could complicate learning.