Nguyen Nam, Young Michael E, Cole James J
Department of Psychology, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL 62901-6502, USA.
Am J Psychol. 2010 Winter;123(4):455-65. doi: 10.5406/amerjpsyc.123.4.0455.
A video game was adapted to investigate the effect of the number of alternatives on causal judgment in a complex environment involving targets with delayed outcomes. Participants were presented with groups of potential targets. Each target (the candidate cause) fired at random relative to the others, with one target in each group causing a delayed explosion (the effect).The participants were tasked with discriminating which of the potential targets was producing the effect. Experiment 1 revealed a main effect of delay on discriminability but no effect of the number of alternatives. However, latencies did increase as the number of alternatives increased, suggesting that discriminability was maintained by compensating with longer observation times. But, a similar increase in latency for longer delays did not offset the detrimental impact of an increase in cause-effect delay. Experiment 2 replicated the outcome under conditions in which participants were always required to observe for 16 s before making a decision; under the most difficult conditions, however, the limited viewing time started to reveal an effect of the number of alternatives on the participants' ability to discriminate a true cause from foils. Evidence suggests that participants' decisions were determined primarily by differences in the number of cause-effect contiguities experienced for the true cause versus the foils.
一款电子游戏被改编用于研究在一个涉及具有延迟结果的目标的复杂环境中，替代选项数量对因果判断的影响。向参与者展示多组潜在目标。每个目标（候选原因）相对于其他目标随机发射，每组中有一个目标会引发延迟爆炸（结果）。参与者的任务是辨别哪个潜在目标产生了该结果。实验1揭示了延迟对可辨别性的主效应，但替代选项数量没有影响。然而，随着替代选项数量的增加，反应时确实增加了，这表明可辨别性是通过更长的观察时间来维持的。但是，对于更长延迟的类似反应时增加并没有抵消因果延迟增加的不利影响。实验2在参与者始终被要求在做出决定前观察16秒的条件下重复了该结果；然而，在最困难的条件下，有限的观察时间开始显示替代选项数量对参与者从陪衬物中辨别真正原因的能力有影响。有证据表明，参与者的决定主要由真正原因与陪衬物所经历的因果接近度数量差异决定。
