A dissociation between causal judgment and outcome recall

It has been suggested that causal learning in humans is similar to Pavlovian conditioning in animals. According to this view, judgments of cause reflect the degree to which an association exists between the cause and the effect. Inferential accounts, by contrast, suggest that causal judgments are reasoning based rather than associative in nature. We used a direct measure of associative strength, identification of the outcome with which a cause was paired (cued recall), to see whether associative strength translated directly into causal ratings. Causal compounds AB+ and CD+ were intermixed with A+ and C- training. Cued-recall performance was better for cue B than for cue D; thus, associative strength was inherited by cue B from the strongly associated cue A (augmentation). However, the reverse was observed on the causal judgment measure: Cue B was judged to be less causal than D (cue competition). These results support an inferential over an associative account of causal judgments.