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Human contingency judgments: rule based or associative?

L G Allan1

  • 1Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Psychological Bulletin
|November 1, 1993
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Human contingency judgments systematically deviate from rule-based models. Associative models, specifically Pavlovian conditioning, offer a more effective heuristic for understanding how people detect event contingencies.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Animal Behavior
  • Learning Theory

Background:

  • Understanding how humans and animals detect event contingencies is a key research area.
  • Rule-based and associative models are two main frameworks for explaining contingency information acquisition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To evaluate rule-based and associative models for human contingency judgments.
  • To determine which model best explains observed human behavior in contingency detection tasks.

Main Methods:

  • Comparative analysis of human contingency judgments against predictions from rule-based models.
  • Assessment of associative models, particularly contiguity models from Pavlovian conditioning.

Main Results:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Human contingency judgments showed systematic deviations from rule-based model predictions.
  • Associative models, especially those based on contiguity, provided a better heuristic.

    • Conclusions:

    • Rule-based models are insufficient for fully explaining human contingency judgments.
    • Contiguity models derived from Pavlovian conditioning offer a valuable framework for understanding human contingency detection.