Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Delays between causes and effects are commonly found in cause-effect relationships in real life. However, previous studies have only investigated delays on the order of seconds. In the current study we tested whether people can learn a cause-effect relation with hour long delays. The delays between the cause and effect were either 0, 3, 9, or 21 hours, and the study lasted 16 days. Surprisingly, we found that participants were able to learn the causal relation about equally as well in all four conditions. These findings demonstrate a remarkable ability to accurately learn causal relations in a realistic timeframe that has never been tested before.