Contingency judgements on the fly

Abstract

The present research was conducted to establish the validity of a novel procedure for measuring human contingency judgements aimed at shortening the length of conventional procedures. Cues and outcomes were simple geometric shapes that were presented in a rapid streaming fashion, reducing the length of a block of trials from several minutes to a few seconds. We establish the reliability of the procedure by replicating two central findings in the contingency judgement literature, and we elaborate on the importance of this method for future research.

The preparation of this paper was supported by research grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to L. G. A. and by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Graduate Scholarship to M. J. C. C. We thank Tom Beckers and one anonymous reviewer for their helpful suggestions, and as well we acknowledge the help provided by Jen Beneteau with regard to data collection. Portions of this research were reported in partial fulfilment of L. K. H.'s undergraduate honours thesis.

Notes

¹It is important to note that the interaction between outcome density and contingency cannot be interpreted due to an experimental confound between outcome density and contingency. The confound owed to the fact that the probability of an outcome was lower in the low outcome density, noncontingent condition (.2) than in the corresponding contingent condition (.33); similarly, the probability of an outcome was higher in the high outcome density, noncontingent condition (.8) than in the corresponding contingent condition (.67). The 2 × 2 contingency matrices containing this experimental confound were previously employed by Allan et al. (2005) and were employed in the current research to ensure that the streamed-trials procedure was as similar as possible to previous research.