title: The role of contingency and contiguity in young and older adults' causal learning.
abstract: Contingency and temporal contiguity are important "cues to causality." In this study, we examined how aging influences the use of this information in response-outcome causal learning. Young and older adults judged a generative causal contingency (i.e., outcome is more likely when a response is made) to be stronger when response and outcome were contiguous than when the outcome was delayed. Contiguity had a similar beneficial effect on young adults' preventative causal learning (i.e., outcome is less likely when a response is made). However, older adults did not judge the preventative relationship to be stronger when the response and outcome were separated by a short delay or when the outcome immediately followed their response. These findings point to a fundamental age-related decline in the acquisition of preventative causal contingencies that may be due to changes in the utilization of cues for the retrieval of absent events.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Western Kentucky University, 1906 College Heights Boulevard, #21030, Bowling Green, KY 42101, USA. sharon.mutter@wku.edu
authors.forename: Sharon A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Mutter
authors.forename: Marci S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: DeCaro
authors.forename: Leslie F
authors.initials: LF
authors.lastname: Plumlee
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001076:Aptitude; D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D003210:Concept Formation; D003463:Cues; D003657:Decision Making; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D008875:Middle Aged; D015233:Models, Statistical; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011337:Probability Learning; D011340:Problem Solving; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time