Buehner Marc J, May Jon
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.
Q J Exp Psychol A. 2003 Jul;56(5):865-90. doi: 10.1080/02724980244000675.
Time plays a pivotal role in causal inference. Nonetheless most contemporary theories of causal induction do not address the implications of temporal contiguity and delay, with the exception of associative learning theory. Shanks, Pearson, and Dickinson (1989) and several replications (Reed, 1992, 1999) have demonstrated that people fail to identify causal relations if cause and effect are separated by more than two seconds. In line with an associationist perspective, these findings have been interpreted to indicate that temporal lags universally impair causal induction. This interpretation clashes with the richness of everyday causal cognition where people apparently can reason about causal relations involving considerable delays. We look at the implications of cause-effect delays from a computational perspective and predict that delays should generally hinder reasoning performance, but that this hindrance should be alleviated if reasoners have knowledge of the delay. Two experiments demonstrated that (1) the impact of delay on causal judgement depends on participants' expectations about the timeframe of the causal relation, and (2) the free-operant procedures used in previous studies are ill-suited to study the direct influences of delay on causal induction, because they confound delay with weaker evidence for the relation in question. Implications for contemporary causal learning theories are discussed.
时间在因果推理中起着关键作用。然而，除了联想学习理论外，大多数当代因果归纳理论都没有涉及时间连续性和延迟的影响。尚克斯、皮尔逊和迪金森（1989年）以及多项重复研究（里德，1992年、1999年）表明，如果原因和结果之间的间隔超过两秒，人们就无法识别因果关系。根据联想主义观点，这些发现被解释为表明时间滞后普遍会损害因果归纳。这种解释与日常因果认知的丰富性相冲突，在日常因果认知中，人们显然能够对涉及相当长时间延迟的因果关系进行推理。我们从计算角度审视因果效应延迟的影响，并预测延迟通常会阻碍推理表现，但如果推理者了解延迟情况，这种阻碍应该会减轻。两项实验表明：（1）延迟对因果判断的影响取决于参与者对因果关系时间框架的预期；（2）先前研究中使用的自由操作程序不适用于研究延迟对因果归纳的直接影响，因为它们将延迟与有关所讨论关系的较弱证据混淆了。本文还讨论了对当代因果学习理论的启示。
