# On the interchangeability of presentation order for cause and effect: Experimental tests of cue and outcome-density effects

## TL;DR

This study examines how people judge the effectiveness of a treatment based on the frequency of outcomes and the order in which events are presented.

## Contribution

The study experimentally tests both cue and outcome-density effects and their interaction with event presentation order.

## Key findings

- Effect density had a larger impact on contingency judgments than cause density.
- Presentation order of cause and effect events had small and non-significant effects.
- Participants were more sensitive to the causal status of events than their temporal order.

## Abstract

Studies of cue-outcome contingency learning demonstrate outcome-density effects: participants typically overestimate contingencies when the outcome event is relatively frequent. Equivalent cue-density effects occur, although these have been examined less often. Few studies have simultaneously examined both event density effects or have manipulated the presentation order of the events, limiting knowledge of whether these phenomena share underlying principles. We report three well-powered experiments to address those gaps. Participants judged the effectiveness of a medical treatment after viewing a series of pairings for two events, a cause (treatment given vs. not) and an effect (patient recovered vs. not). Experiment 1 manipulated both event densities independently. We then manipulated the presentation order for the cause and the effect, alongside a manipulation of effect density (Experiment 2a) or cause density (Experiment 2b). Experiment 1 found a large main effect of event density (
ηp2
 = .55), which was qualified by a significant interaction between event type and density level (
ηp2
 = .10) whereby effect density had greater impact than cause density. Experiments 2a and 2b found effects for effect density (
ηp2
 = .60) and cause density (
ηp2
= .31). The effects of cause–effect presentation order were always small and non-significant. We conclude that effect-density manipulations had substantial impact on contingency judgements, and cause-density manipulations less so. Moreover, it matters little which event (cause or effect) is seen first. These findings have implications for contingency, associative, probabilistic, and causal models of contingency judgement; primarily, that people may be more sensitive to the causal status of events than to their temporal order of presentation.