The influence of causal interpretation on memory for system states

Title data

Schoppek, Wolfgang:
The influence of causal interpretation on memory for system states.
In: Moore, Johanna D.; Stenning, Keith (Eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. - Mahwah, NJ : Erlbaum , 2001 . - pp. 904-909
ISBN 0-8058-4152-0

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Abstract in another language

This paper reports an experiment that investigated the influence of causal interpretation on acquisition and use
of two knowledge types about a static system: I-O knowledge (instances of system states) and structural knowledge (knowledge about causal relations within the system). One group of subjects saw system states without being informed about the causal nature of the material. Another group saw the same states as switches and lamps. It is assumed that the group without causal interpretation can only acquire I-O knowledge. If I-O knowledge is the predominant type when dealing with small systems, then there should be no group differences in a recognition task. Actually, the group with causal interpretation discriminates much better between targets and distractors, but with longer RTs. This is interpreted in terms of structural knowledge acquired by the group with causal interpretation, which was used to reconstruct system states in cases of doubt. Results of a task where subjects had to judge single causal relations support that interpretation, but also indicate that the knowledge about effects is probably not represented in an explicit, symbolic form. An ACT-R model that uses associations between events as a subsymbolic form of structural knowledge reproduces the data well. Thus, data and model support the significance of I-O knowledge but also shed some light on the role and the development of structural knowledge.