Beyond Covariation: Cues to Causal Structure

Causal induction has two components: learning about the structure of causal models and learning about causal strength and other quantitative parameters. This chapter argues for several interconnected theses. First, people represent causal knowledge qualitatively, in terms of causal structure; quantitative knowledge is derivative. Second, people use a variety of cues to infer causal structure aside from statistical data (e.g. temporal order, intervention, coherence with prior knowledge). Third, once a structural model is hypothesized, subsequent statistical data are used to confirm, refute, or elaborate the model. Fourth, people are limited in the number and complexity of causal models that they can hold in mind to test, but they can separately learn and then integrate simple models, and revise models by adding and removing single links. Finally, current computational models of learning need further development before they can be applied to human learning

Constraint-Based Human Causal Learning

Department of Philosophy technical repor

Constraint-Based Human Causal Learning

Much of human cognition and activity depends on causal beliefs and reasoning. In psychological research on human causal learning and inference, we usually suppose that we have a set of binary potential causes, C1, …, Cn, and a known binary effect, E, all typically present-absent values of a property or event. The differentiation into potential causes and effect is made on the basis of external factors, including prior knowledge or temporal information. Given these variables, people are then asked to infer the existence and strength of causal relationships between the Ci’s and E from observed data in one of several formats (serially, as a list, or in a summary). The standard measure of people’s causal beliefs is a rating of some proxy for causal influence, where a zero rating indicates no causal relationship. The exact probe question varies betwee