Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Cue competition effects in human contingency learningappear to be sensitive to the causal nature of cue-outcomerelationships. While blocking effects are reliablydemonstrated in scenarios where cues are presented as causesof outcomes, several studies have failed to find blocking inscenarios where cues are presented as effects of outcomes, afinding that is typically taken as evidence for the involvementof controlled reasoning processes in cue competition. Thesestudies typically measure blocking with continuous causalratings about individual cues. Previous studies have foundthat sensitivity to causal model may depend on how the testquestion is phrased. In contrast, the current study tested thesensitivity of blocking to causal scenarios across differentformats of the same test question. Participants completed acausal learning task with instructions suggesting either apredictive (i.e. cue causes outcome) or diagnostic (cue iscaused by outcome) cue-outcome relationship. Participantswere then asked about the likelihood of outcomes occurringby either giving a continuous rating of each outcome or adiscrete choice about the most likely outcome. Whenmeasured by continuous ratings of individual cues, blockingwas evident in predictive, but not diagnostic scenarios.However, when measured by discrete choice or using acompound negation test, blocking was robust and insensitiveto causal scenario. The results suggest that contributions ofpredictive memory and causal reasoning to cue competitioneffects may depend substantially on the type of measure used.