Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research had shown that a strong relationship between a causal factor and an outcome reduces estimates of the relationship between a second causal factor and the same outcome (two causal factors, one outcome). In the present experiment subjects judged the effect of one response (pressing a spacebar) on two outcomes (a ball and/or a box might change color). W e used an operant-like procedure in which subjects did problems on the video screen of a computer. The response was involved in various contingencies with the ball and box. In the critical condition one outcome (changes in the color of the box) was highly correlated with the cause (pressing the spacebar) and the other, target, outcome (changing ball color) was only modestly related to the cause. In contrast to earlier work the concurrent strong causal relationship increased the perceived causal relationship between the target outcome and the cause. T h e present experiment was derived from and its results are partially accounted for by the Rescorla-Wagner model (1972), which is a simple connectionist model.