Exploring the role of stimulus similarity on the summation effect in causal learning

Abstract

Several contemporary models of associative learning anticipate that the higher responding to a compound of two cues separately trained with a common outcome than to each of the cues alone -a summation effect- is modulated by the similarity between the cues forming the compound. Here, we explored this hypothesis in a series of causal learning experiments with humans. Participants were presented with two visual cues that separately predicted a common outcome and later asked for the outcome predicted by the compound of the two cues. Importantly, cue similarity was varied between groups through changes in shape, spatial position, color, configuration and rotation. In variance with the predictions of these models, we observed similar and strong levels of summation in both groups across all manipulations of similarity (Experiments 1-5). The summation effect was significantly reduced by manipulations intended to impact assumptions about the causal independence of the cues forming the compound, but this reduction was independent of stimulus similarity (Experiment 6). These results are problematic for similarity-based models and can be more readily explained by rational approaches to causal learning.