ON THE ORIGIN OF PERSONAL CAUSAL THEORIES

Detecting the causal relations among environmental events is an import ant facet of learning. Certain variables have been identified which in fluence both human causal attribution and animal learning: temporal pr iority, temporal and spatial contiguity, covariation and contingency, and prior experience. Recent research has continued to find distinct c ommonalities between the influence these variables have in the two dom ains, supporting a neo-Humean analysis of the origins of personal caus al theories. The cues to causality determine which event relationships will be judged as causal; personal causal theories emerge as a result of these judgments and in turn affect future attributions. An examina tion of animal learning research motivates further extensions of the a nalogy. Researchers are encouraged to study real-time causal attributi ons, to study additional methodological analogies to conditioning para digms, and to develop rich learning accounts of the acquisition of cau sal theories.