Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When making causal inferences, prior research shows that peopleare capable of controlling for alternative causes. These studies,however, utilize artificial inter-trial intervals on the order ofseconds; in real-life situations people often experience data overdays and weeks (e.g., learning the effectiveness of two newmedications over multiple weeks). In the current study, participantslearned about two possible causes from data presented in atraditional trial-by-trial paradigm (rapid series of trials) versus amore naturalistic paradigm (one trial per day for multiple weeks viasmartphone). Our results suggest that while people are capable ofdetecting simple cause-effect relations that do not requirecontrolling for another cause when learning over weeks, they havedifficulty learning cause-effect relations that require controlling foralternative causes.