The Role of Contingency and Contiguity in Young and Older Adults' Causal Learning

Sharon A. Mutter, Marci S. DeCaro and Leslie F. Plumlee

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 2009, vol. 64B, issue 3, 315-323

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. Copyright 2009, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/geronb/gbp004 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:geronb:v:64b:y:2009:i:3:p:315-323

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Journals of Gerontology: Series B is currently edited by Psychological Sciences - S. Duke Han, PhD and Social Sciences - Jessica A Kelley, PhD, FGSA

More articles in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B from The Gerontological Society of America Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().