Causal learning from interventions and dynamics in continuous time

Event timing and interventions are important and intertwinedcues to causal structure, yet they have typically been studiedseparately. We bring them together for the first time in an ex-periment where participants learn causal structure by perform-ing interventions in continuous time. We contrast learning inacyclic and cyclic devices, with reliable and unreliable cause–effect delays. We show that successful learners use interven-tions to structure and simplify their interactions with the de-vices and that we can capture judgment patterns with heuristicsbased on online construction and testing of a single structura

From the structure of experience to concepts of structure: How the concept cause is attributed to objects and events.

The pervasive presence of relational information in concepts, and its indirect presence in sensory input, raises the question of how it is extracted from experience. We operationalized experience as a stream of events in which reliable predictive relationships exist among random ones, and in which learners are naïve as to what they will learn (i.e., a statistical learning paradigm). First, we asked whether predictive event pairs would spontaneously be seen as causing each other, given no instructions to evaluate causality. We found that predictive information indeed informed later causal judgments but did not lead to a spontaneous sense of causality. Thus, event contingencies are relevant to causal inference, but such interpretations may not occur fully bottom-up. A second question was how such experience might be used to learn about novel objects. Because events occurred either around or involving a continually present object, we were able to distinguish objects from events. We found that objects can be attributed causal properties by virtue of a higher-order structure, in which the objects identity is linked not to the increased likelihood of its effect, but rather, to the predictive structure among events, given its presence. This is an important demonstration that objects causal properties can be highly abstract: They need not refer to an occurrence of a sensory event per se, or its link to an object, but rather to whether or not a predictive relationship holds among events in its presence. These learning mechanisms may be important for acquiring abstract knowledge from experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

Constructing the world: Active causal learning in cognition

Humans are adept at constructing causal models of the world that can support prediction, explanation, simulation-based reasoning, planning and control. In this thesis I explore how people learn about the causal world interacting with it, and how they represent and modify their causal knowledge as they gather evidence. Over 10 experiments and modelling, I show that interventional and temporal cues, along with top-down hierarchical constraints, inform the gradual evolution and adaptation of increasingly rich causal representations. Chapters 1 and 2 develop a rational analysis of the problems of learning and representing causal structure, and choosing interventions, that perturb the world in ways that reveal its structure. Chapters 3--5 focus on structure learning over sequences of discrete trials, in which learners can intervene by setting variables within a causal system and observe the consequences. The second half of the thesis generalises beyond the discrete trial learning case, exploring interventional causal learning in situations where events occur in continuous time (Chapters 6 and 7); and in spatiotemporally rich physical "microworlds" (Chapter 8). Throughout the experiments, I find that both children and adults are robust active causal learners, able to deal with noise and complexity even as normative judgment and intervention selection become radically intractable. To explain their success, I develop scalable process level accounts of both causal structure learning and intervention selection inspired by approximation algorithms in machine learning. I show that my models can better explain patterns of behaviour than a range of alternatives as well as shedding light on the source of common biases including confirmatory testing, anchoring effects and probability matching. Finally, I propose a close relationship between active learning and active aspects of cognition including thinking, decision making and executive control