Greville W James, Buehner Marc J
a College of Medicine , Swansea University , Swansea , Wales , UK.
b School of Psychology , Cardiff University , Cardiff , Wales , UK.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2016;69(4):678-97. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1041535. Epub 2015 May 21.
When the temporal interval or delay separating cause and effect is consistent over repeated instances, it becomes possible to predict when the effect will follow from the cause, hence temporal predictability serves as an appropriate term for describing consistent cause-effect delays. It has been demonstrated that in instrumental action-outcome learning tasks, enhancing temporal predictability by holding the cause-effect interval constant elicits higher judgements of causality compared to conditions involving variable temporal intervals. Here, we examine whether temporal predictability exerts a similar influence when causal learning takes place through observation rather than intervention through instrumental action. Four experiments demonstrated that judgements of causality were higher when the temporal interval was constant than when it was variable, and that judgements declined with increasing variability. We further found that this beneficial effect of predictability was stronger in situations where the effect base-rate was zero (Experiments 1 and 3). The results therefore clearly indicate that temporal predictability enhances impressions of causality, and that this effect is robust and general. Factors that could mediate this effect are discussed.
当在重复的事例中，原因和结果之间的时间间隔或延迟保持一致时，就有可能预测结果何时会跟随原因出现，因此时间可预测性是描述一致的因果延迟的一个恰当术语。已经证明，在工具性动作-结果学习任务中，与涉及可变时间间隔的条件相比，通过保持因果间隔恒定来提高时间可预测性会引发更高的因果判断。在此，我们研究当因果学习通过观察而非通过工具性动作进行干预时，时间可预测性是否会产生类似的影响。四项实验表明，当时间间隔恒定时，因果判断高于时间间隔可变时，并且判断随着变异性的增加而下降。我们进一步发现，在效果基础概率为零的情况下（实验1和3），这种可预测性的有益效果更强。因此，结果清楚地表明，时间可预测性增强了因果印象，并且这种效果是稳健且普遍的。文中还讨论了可能介导这种效果的因素。
