Alloy, L. B., & Tabachnik, N. (1984). Assessment of covariation by humans and animals: The joint influence of prior expectations and current situational information.
Proposes a theoretical framework for understanding and integrating people's and animals' covariation assessment. It is argued that covariation perception is determined by the interaction between 2 sources of information: (a) the organism's prior expectations about the covariation between 2 events and (b) current situational information provided by the environment about the objective contingency between the events. Both accuracies and errors in people's and animals' covariation ...