A comparative approach to cue competition with one and two strong predictors

Abstract

The relative validity effect (Wagner, Logan, Haberlandt, & Price, 1968) demonstrated that a strong cue or cause reduces responding to, or judgments of, a weaker cue or cause. We report two experiments with human subjects using relative validity preparations in which we investigate one- and two-cue competition effects. Previously, we investigated the effect using instrumental and Pavlovian conditioning preparations with rats. In the first experiment, we used a procedure analogous to the animal preparations. In the second experiment, we used a different probabilistic procedure. The results with humans and rats are very similar. In each species we find similar interference with processing the moderate predictor with one or with two strong competitors. These results are not well predicted by most associative models.

Cultural Differences in Revaluative Attributions

“…In total, 395 participants were recruited in Studies 1 and 2, and the pattern of the cultural differences in revaluative attribution was found in both studies, suggesting that this finding is reliable. Although the present studies used only a single domain (allergies), dozens of published reports examining attibution effects used this same type of allergy task (attributing allergic reaction to food substances; for example, Baetu et al, 2005;Van Hamme & Wasserman, 1994;Wasserman & Berglan, 1998;Wasserman & Castro, 2005), but as mentioned below, one important aim for future work is to explore these findings in other domains. The current study makes two distinct contributions to understanding cultural differences in attribution processes.…”

“…Participants were asked to complete a questionnaire. The questionnaire first introduced an imaginary scenario that instructed participants to imagine themselves as allergists, and their job was to determine which food(s) produce allergic reactions (e.g., Baetu et al, 2005;Van Hamme & Wasserman, 1994;Wasserman & Berglan, 1998;Wasserman & Castro, 2005). Tasks were embedded in a story with an assumed patient making them potentially more realistic and vivid.…”

“…In Study 1, we tested the cultural differences in attribution using food allergy scenarios (e.g., Baetu et al, 2005;Van Hamme & Wasserman, 1994;Wasserman & Berglan, 1998;Wasserman & Castro, 2005). In Study 2, we sought to replicate our findings from Study 1, and added certain control conditions.…”

Causal judgements about two causal candidates: Accounting for occurrences, estimating strength, and the importance of interaction judgements

“…A small number of studies have extended the investigation of discounting to the case where there are three possible causes of an outcome (Baetu, Baker, Darredeau, & Murphy, 2005;Darredeau, Baetu, Baker, & Murphy, 2009). The motivation behind these studies was to test predictions of associative learning models where one cause was judged against information about a single alternative cause or against the same contingency information distributed between two alternative causes.…”

“…Labelling the three causes X, A, and B, as Baetu et al (2005) and Darredeau et al (2009) did, results in the following set of weights for judgements of Cause X, the cause of interest in this research: wXA'0wXB'0.15; wXAÁ0 wXBÁ0.075; wX'0.4; wXÁ0.15; wA'0 wB'0wAB'0.15; w0'0.075; wAÁ0wBÁ 0wABÁ0w0Á00. X', XA', and XB' are confirmatory and all other combinations with nonzero weight are disconfirmatory.…”