Zhang Yiwen, Rottman Benjamin M
Uinversity of Pittsburg, Pittsburgh, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2024 Feb;31(1):312-324. doi: 10.3758/s13423-023-02342-x. Epub 2023 Aug 14.
Considerable delays between causes and effects are commonly found in real life. However, previous studies have only investigated how well people can learn probabilistic relations with delays on the order of seconds. In the current study we tested whether people can learn a cause-effect relation with delays of 0, 3, 9, or 21 hours, and the study lasted 16 days. We found that learning was slowed with longer delays, but by the end of 16 days participants had learned the cause-effect relation in all four conditions, and they had learned the relation about equally well in all four conditions. This suggests that in real-world situations people may still be fairly accurate at inferring cause-effect relations with delays if they have enough experience. We also discuss ways that delays may interact with other real-world factors that could complicate learning.
在现实生活中，原因和结果之间常常存在相当长的延迟。然而，以往的研究仅探讨了人们在几秒量级的延迟情况下学习概率关系的能力。在本研究中，我们测试了人们是否能够学习延迟时间分别为0小时、3小时、9小时或21小时的因果关系，且该研究持续了16天。我们发现，延迟时间越长，学习速度越慢，但到第16天结束时，参与者在所有四种条件下都学会了因果关系，并且在所有四种条件下对这种关系的掌握程度大致相同。这表明，在现实世界的情况下，如果人们有足够的经验，那么他们在推断存在延迟的因果关系时可能仍然相当准确。我们还讨论了延迟可能与其他会使学习变得复杂的现实世界因素相互作用的方式。
