The tendency to stop collecting information is linked to illusions of causality Moreno Fernández, María Manuela Blanco Bregón, Fernando Matute, Helena Support for this research was provided by Grants RTI2018-096700-J-I00, PSI2017-83196-R and PSI2016-78818-R from Agencia Estatal de Investigación of the Spanish Government (AEI) and European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) awarded to María Manuela Moreno-Fernandez, Fernando Blanco and Helena Matute respectively, as well as Grant IT955-16 from the Basque Government awarded to Helena Matute. This research was conducted while the first two authors were at the University of Deusto. Previous research proposed that cognitive biases contribute to produce and maintain the symptoms exhibited by deluded patients. Specifically, the tendency to jump to conclusions (i.e., to stop collecting evidence soon before making a decision) has been claimed to contribute to delusion formation. Additionally, deluded patients show an abnormal understanding of cause-effect relationships, often leading to causal illusions (i.e., the belief that two events are causally connected, when they are not). Both types of bias appear in psychotic disorders, but also in healthy individuals. In two studies, we test the hypothesis that the two biases (jumping to conclusions and causal illusions) appear in the general population and correlate with each other. The rationale is based on current theories of associative learning that explain causal illusions as the result of a learning bias that tends to wear off as additional information is incorporated. We propose that participants with higher tendency to jump to conclusions will stop collecting information sooner in a causal learning study than those participants with lower tendency to jump to conclusions, which means that the former will not reach the learning asymptote, leading to biased judgments. The studies provide evidence in favour that the two biases are correlated but suggest that the proposed mechanism is not responsible for this association. 2021-04-30T10:57:20Z 2021-04-30T10:57:20Z 2021-02-16 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Moreno-Fernández, M.M., Blanco, F. & Matute, H. The tendency to stop collecting information is linked to illusions of causality. Sci Rep 11, 3942 (2021). [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82075-w] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/68241 10.1038/s41598-021-82075-w eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España Nature