The 28th Bartlett Memorial Lecture Causal learning: An associative analysis

The concordance between performance and judgements of the causal effectiven ess of an instrumental action suggests that such actions are media ted by c ausal knowledge. Although causal learning exhibits many associative phenome na-blocking, inhibitory or preventative learning, and super-learning-judgem ents of the causal status of a cue can be changed retrospectively as a resu lt of learning episodes that do not directly involve the cue. In order to e xplain retrospective revaluation, a modified associative theory is describe d in which the learning processes for retrieved cue representations are the opposite to those for presented cues, and this theory is evaluated by stud ies of the role of within-compound associations in retrospective revaluatio n and blocking. However, this modified theory only applies when the within- compound association represents a contiguous rather than a causal cue relat ionship.