The influence of causal connections between symptoms on the diagnosis of mental disorders: evidence from online and offline measures.

An experiment conducted with students and experienced clinicians demonstrated very fast and online causal reasoning in the diagnosis of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) mental disorders. The experiment also demonstrated that clinicians' causal reasoning is triggered by information that is directly related to the causal structure that explains the symptoms, such as their temporal sequence. The use of causal theories was measured through explicit, verbal diagnostic judgments and through the online registration of participants' reading times of clinical reports.

Renewal effects in interference between outcomes as measured by a cued response reaction time task: further evidence for associative retrieval models.

Two experiments demonstrated renewal effects in interference between outcomes in human participants. Experiment 1 revealed a XYX renewal effect, whereas Experiment 2 showed a XYZ renewal effect. The results from both experiments conformed to Bouton's (1993) theory of interference and recovery from interference, and contradicted the predictions derived from alternative accounts.

Interference between outcomes, spontaneous recovery, and context effects as measured by a cued response reaction time task: evidence for associative retrieval models.

The most common associative explanation of interference is based on a retrieval failure. Retrieval, in turn, is considered as the result of an associative activation mechanism that is thought to be fast and automatic. However, up-to-date, there is no evidence of interference based on dependent measures specifically related to this kind of low level processes.