Shanks D R, Lopez F J
Department of Psychology, University College, London, England.
Mem Cognit. 1996 Jul;24(4):511-22. doi: 10.3758/bf03200939.
Waldmann and Holyoak (1992) presented evidence in support of the claim that cue selection does not emerge in "diagnostic" human learning tasks in which the cues are interpretable as effects and the outcomes as the causes of those effects. Waldmann and Holyoak argued that this evidence presents a major difficulty for associationist theories of learning and instead supports a "causal model" theory. We identify a number of flaws in Waldmann and Holyoak's experimental procedures and report three new experiments designed to test their claim. In Experiment 1, cue selection was observed regardless of causal order and regardless of whether the cues were abstractly or concretely specified. In Experiments 2 and 3, cue selection was again observed when subjects predicted causes from effects. We conclude that our results are consistent with simple associationist theories of learning but contradict Waldmann and Holyoak's causal model theory.
瓦尔德曼和霍利约克（1992）提出了证据，支持如下观点：在“诊断性”人类学习任务中不会出现线索选择，在这类任务里，线索可被解释为结果，而结果则是这些结果的原因。瓦尔德曼和霍利约克认为，这一证据给联想主义学习理论带来了重大难题，转而支持一种“因果模型”理论。我们发现了瓦尔德曼和霍利约克实验程序中的若干缺陷，并报告了旨在检验他们观点的三项新实验。在实验1中，无论因果顺序如何，也无论线索是抽象规定还是具体规定，均观察到了线索选择。在实验2和实验3中，当受试者从结果预测原因时，再次观察到了线索选择。我们得出结论，我们的结果与简单的联想主义学习理论一致，但与瓦尔德曼和霍利约克的因果模型理论相矛盾。
