Effect of outcome valence on positive and negative patterning in human causal reasoning |
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Authors: | J W Whitlow |
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Institution: | 1.Rutgers University,Camden |
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Abstract: | The importance of configural cues and whether a situation involves beneficent or maleficent outcomes was investigated in two
experiments on human causal reasoning, based on experienced causal information. Participants learned positive and negative
patterning discriminations involving either beneficent or maleficent outcomes in a health-reasoning task and in a social-reasoning
task. With maleficent outcomes, positive patterning was consistently easier to learn than negative patterning, a positive
patterning advantage that is predicted by current associative theories and commonly taken as evidence for configural cues.
However, with beneficent outcomes, the two discrimination tasks were not significantly different in ease of learning, a result
not predicted by current theories. The reliable positive patterning effect found with maleficent outcomes broadens the range
of conditions in which the effect can be shown in causal reasoning. The novel effect of outcome valence poses an interesting
theoretical challenge for attempts to account for the relation between learning about individual cues and combinations of
those cues. |
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Keywords: | |
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