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Causal Learning

How do organisms learn about causal relationships in the world surrounding them?

Much effort has already been spent in investigations that tried to solve the question of how humans and other animals manage to do this important task. Nevertheless there has been considerable disagreement among researchers how the process of causal induction might take place.

Within the field of cognitive psychology some researchers believe that humans mentally compare different sources of probabilistic or statistical information to derive estimates of possible causal relationships. In contrast to this, we believe that in many situations causal learning might be based on some kind of associative mechanism. This view is supported by many parallels between results from the domain of animal conditioning and human causal learning. In line with this many well-known effects that have been known for years in the animal lab have been demonstrated in human causal learning tasks during recent years (e.g., acquisition curves, blocking, conditioned inhibition, positive and negative patterning, ...). Furthermore, effects from the field of human associative learning have as well been found in the domain of animal conditioning.

In some cases, however, problems of this associative view have emerged in recent years. These concern for example the fact that traditional associative theories assume that only cues that are present on a given trial may alter their associative value. In contrast to this it has repeatedly been found that this basic assumption is incorrect. In fact, many studies have shown that the associative value of cues may be altered in situations when they are actually absent. - How associative theories can be modified to account for such effects is the question of one of our current research projects.