Psychology

Temporal predictability refers to the regularity or consistency of the time interval separating events. When encountering repeated instances of causes and effects, we also experience multiple cause–effect temporal intervals. Where this interval is constant it becomes possible to predict when the effect will follow from the cause. In contrast, interval variability entails unpredictability. Three experiments investigated the extent to which temporal predictability contributes to the inductive processes of human causal learning. The authors demonstrated that (a) causal relations with fixed temporal intervals are consistently judged as stronger than those with variable temporal intervals, (b) that causal judgments decline as a function of temporal uncertainty, and (c) that this effect remains undiminished with increased learning time. The results therefore clearly indicate that temporal predictability facilitates causal discovery. The authors considered the implications of their findings for various theoretical perspectives, including associative learning theory, the attribution shift hypothesis, and causal structure models.

Virtual environments (VEs) provide an inexpensive way of conducting ecologically valid psychological research. The present study used a VE to demonstrate conditioned suppression, a behavioral model of anxiety, in a first-person perspective video game. During operant training, participants learned to shoot
crates to find gold bars and thus score points in the game. Next, during Pavlovian conditioning, a colored light (i.e., conditioned stimulus: CS+) was followed by a white noise unconditioned stimulus (US) while a different colored light (CS) was not paired with the US. Probe trials in a final testing phase were then used to assess suppression. We found significant suppression of accurate responding (shots hitting the designated targets) during the presence of the CS+ relative to the CS, both in terms of total hits and hits as a proportion of total shots. Importantly, this effect emerged despite the overall level of operant responding being undiminished during the CS+. Our findings are consistent with related studies examining human behavior in real environments, and demonstrate the potential of VEs in combination with a modestly aversive CS to allow a detailed behavioral profile of anxiety to emerge.

Time occupies a central role in both the induction of causal relationships and determining the subjective value of rewards. Delays devalue rewards and also impair learning of relation-ships between events.The mathematical relation between the time until a delayed reward and its present value has been characterized as a hyperbola-like function, and increasing delays of reinforcement tend to elicit judgments or response rates that similarly show a
negatively accelerated decay pattern. Furthermore, neurological research implicates both the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in both these processes. Since both processes are broadly concerned with the concepts of reward, value, and time, involve a similar functional form, and have been identified as involving the same specific brain regions, it seems tempting to assume that the two processes are underpinned by the same cognitive or neural mechanisms.We set out to determine experimentally whether a common cognitive mechanism underlies these processes, by contrasting individual performances on causal judgment and delay discounting tasks. Results from each task corresponded with previous findings in the literature, but no relation was found between the two tasks. The task was replicated and extended by including two further measures, the Barrett Impulsiveness Scale (BIS), and a causal attribution task. Performance on this latter task was correlated with results on the causal judgment task, and also with the non-planning component of the BIS, but the results from the delay discounting task was not correlated with either causal learning task nor the BIS. Implications for current theories of learning are considered.

Abstract Many studies of Action-Outcome Learning have demonstrated that reinforcement delays exert a detrimental influence on learning performance. Different theoretical perspectives offer varying explanations for this effect. A rational perspective suggests that as long as action-outcome pairings can be clearly recognized, delays should not interfere with the inductive process.

When the temporal interval or delay separating cause and effect is consistent over repeated instances, it
becomes possible to predict when the effect will follow from the cause, hence temporal predictability
serves as an appropriate term for describing consistent cause-effect delays. It has been demonstrated
that in instrumental action-outcome learning tasks, enhancing temporal predictability by holding the
cause-effect interval constant elicits higher judgements of causality compared to conditions involving
variable temporal intervals. Here, we examine whether temporal predictability exerts a similar influence
when causal learning takes place through observation rather than intervention through instrumental
action. Four experiments demonstrated that judgements of causality were higher when the temporal
interval was constant than when it was variable, and that judgements declined with increasing variability.
We further found that this beneficial effect of predictability was stronger in situations where the
effect base-rate was zero (Experiments 1 and 3). The results therefore clearly indicate that temporal predictability
enhances impressions of causality, and that this effect is robust and general. Factors that
could mediate this effect are discussed.