ABSTRACT
From at least Ferster and Skinner’s (1957) early work documented in Schedules of Reinforcement there has been a great deal of interest in contingencies of reinforcement. The relation between the conditional stimulus (CS) and the unconditional stimulus (US) in Pavlovian conditioning and between the response and the outcome or reinforcer has long been known to exert subtle control over animal behavior. Moreover, students of causal reasoning consider the correlation or contingency between cause and effect to be one of the crucial empirical determinants of the causal reasoning process (e.g., Einhorn & Hogarth, 1986). Recently there have been attempts to analyze how humans judge contingencies in causal reasoning scenarios and in categorization tasks in terms of contingency sensitivity. Much of this research has been motivated by associative models derived directly from experiments on animal learning (e.g., Baker, Mercier, Vallée-Tourangeau, Frank, & Pan, 1993; Shanks, 1991; Wasserman, Elek, Chatlosh, & Baker, 1993)
