Temporal Contiguity and Contingency Judgments: A Pavlovian Analogue

The two experiments reported examine the role of temporal contiguity on judgments of contingency in a human analogue of the Pavlovian task. The data show that the effect of the actual delay on contingency judgment depends on the observer's expectation regarding the delay. For a fixed contingency between the cue and the outcome, ratings of the contingency are higher when the actual delay is congruent with the observer's expectation than when it is incongruent. We argue that our data can be understood within the context of the temporal coding hypothesis.