Pérez Omar D, San Martín René, Soto Fabián A
1 Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA.
2 Nuffield College CESS Santiago, Facultad de Administración y Economía, Universidad de Santiago, Santiago de Chile, Chile.
Exp Psychol. 2018 Jul;65(4):183-200. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169/a000406.
Several contemporary models anticipate that the summation effect is modulated by the similarity between the cues forming a compound. Here, we explore this hypothesis in a series of causal learning experiments. Participants were presented with two visual cues that separately predicted a common outcome and later asked for the outcome predicted by the compound of the two cues. Similarity was varied between groups through changes in shape, spatial position, color, configuration, and rotation. In variance with the predictions of these models, we observed similar and strong levels of summation in both groups across all manipulations of similarity. The effect, however, was significantly reduced by manipulations intended to impact assumptions about the causal independence of the cues forming the compound, but this reduction was independent of stimulus similarity. These results are problematic for similarity-based models and can be more readily explained by rational approaches to causal learning.
几种当代模型预测，总和效应会受到构成复合线索之间相似性的调节。在此，我们在一系列因果学习实验中探究这一假设。向参与者呈现两个分别预测共同结果的视觉线索，随后要求他们说出由这两个线索组成的复合线索所预测的结果。通过形状、空间位置、颜色、配置和旋转的变化，使不同组之间的相似性有所不同。与这些模型的预测不同，我们观察到，在所有相似性操作中，两组的总和水平都相似且强烈。然而，旨在影响对构成复合线索因果独立性假设的操作显著降低了这种效应，但这种降低与刺激相似性无关。这些结果对基于相似性的模型来说是个问题，并且可以通过因果学习的理性方法更容易地解释。
