Retrospective revaluation of causal judgments under positive and negative contingencies

Retrospective revaluation of causal judgments was investigated in a 2-stage procedure. Ln the Ist stage, compounds of 2 cues were associated with the outcome, whereas in the 2nd stage, a cue from each compound was trained by itself. Associating this cue with the outcome in the 2nd stage had no detectable effect on the causal rating of the other cue from the compound, whereas presenting it without the outcome enhanced the causal rating of the other cue. The retrospective revaluation of the causal rating of these productive cues and also of preventative cues depended on consistent pairing of the cues during compound training, suggesting a role for within-compound associations. These results favor associative accounts of retrospective revaluation that use separate excitatory and inhibitory learning processes rather than a general error-correcting learning algorithm.