Predictions and causal estimations are not supported by the same associative structure Miguel A. Vadillo and Helena Matute Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain Studies performed by different researchers have shown that judgements about cue – outcome relation- ships are systematically influenced by the type of question used to request those judgements. It is now recognized that judgements about the strength of the causal link between a cue and an outcome are mostly determined by the cue – outcome contingency, whereas predictions of the outcome are more influenced by the probability of the outcome given the cue. Although these results make clear that those different types of judgement are mediated by some knowledge of the normative differences between causal estimations and outcome predictions, they do not speak to the underlying processes of these effects. The experiment presented here reveals an interaction between the type of question and the order of trials that challenges standard models of causal and predictive learning that are framed exclusively in associative terms or exclusively in higher order reasoning terms. However, this evidence could be easily explained by assuming the combined intervention of both types of process. Although the study of human contingency learn- ing is far from being a young field in psychology (Jenkins & Ward, 1965; Smedslund, 1963; Ward & Jenkins, 1965) and was extraordinarily stimu- lated during the 1980s (Allan & Jenkins, 1983; Dickinson, Shanks, & Evenden, 1984; Wasserman, Chatlosh, & Neunaber, 1983), few would deny that this area of investigation is now experiencing one of its most intense moments. Many of the resulting studies have focused on the distinction between two general, theoretical views of causal learning. One of these frameworks assumes that causal learning is mostly determined by higher order cognitive processes related to stat- istical reasoning (Allan, 1980; Cheng, 1997; Cheng & Novick, 1992) or deductive inference (De Houwer, Beckers, & Glautier, 2002; Lovibond, Been, Mitchell, Bouton, & Frohardt, 2003). The second framework, on the contrary, regards causal learning as the result of rather mechanistic associative processes, which automati- cally capture interevent contingencies without the need for a deliberate and conscious process of reasoning (Allan, 1993; Dickinson et al., 1984). The distinction between these two frameworks (see Shanks, 2007, for a comprehensive review) is Correspondence should be addressed to Miguel A. Vadillo or Helena Matute, Departamento de Psicologı ´a, Universidad de Deusto, Apartado 1, 48080 Bilbao, Spain. E-mail: mvadillo@fice.deusto.es or matute@fice.deusto.es Support for this research was provided by Grant PI – 2000 – 12 from Departamento de Educacio ´ n, Universidades, e Investigacio ´n of the Basque Government to H.M. M.A.V. was supported by an FPI fellowship from the Basque Government (Ref. BFI01.31). We would like to thank Jan De Houwer, Francisco Lo ´pez, and Pedro Cobos for their insightful discussions concerning the experiments presented here. # 2007 The Experimental Psychology Society 433 http://www.psypress.com/qjep DOI:10.1080/17470210601002520 THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 2007, 60 (3), 433–447