Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Fenker, Waldmann, & Holyoak (2005) found that participants are faster to recognize a causal relation between wordspresented in predictive (cause first) than in diagnostic order (effect first). We extended these findings to a comparison of abstractand concrete word pairs. Causality may play a more prominent role in abstract concept relations. Given that causally relatedabstract concepts are not always observable, they may often involve diagnostic reasoning (e.g. inferring motives). Across twoexperiments, participants made timed judgments of whether abstract and concrete word pairs of equal bidirectional associativestrength were causally related. Items were presented in blocks comprising pairs in either predictive or diagnostic order. Reactiontimes were significantly lower for predictive order compared to diagnostic. This was not moderated by abstractness, but therewas a slightly greater effect for concrete pairs. These data indicate that causal relations are likely stored in memory for bothabstract and concrete concepts.