Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Two studies investigated how people learn the strength of therelation between a cause and an effect in a time series settingin which both variables exhibit temporal trends. In priorresearch, we found that people control for temporal trends byfocusing on transitions, how variables change from oneobservation to the next in a trial-by-trial presentation (Soo &Rottman, 2018). In Experiment 1, we replicated this effect,and found further evidence that people rely on transitionswhen there are extremely strong temporal trends. InExperiment 2, we investigated how people infer causalrelations from time series data when presented as time seriesgraphs. Though people were often able to control for thetemporal trends, they had difficulty primarily when the causeand effect exhibited trends in opposite directions and therewas a positive causal relationship. These findings shed lighton when people can and can’t accurately learn causal relationsin time-series settings.