The role of contingency and contiguity in young and older adults' causal learning

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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.

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Mutter, S. A., Decaro, M. S., & Plumlee, L. F. (2009). The role of contingency and contiguity in young and older adults’ causal learning. Journals of Gerontology - Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 64(3), 315–323. https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbp004

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