The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map ” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism.

This technical definition will only make sense toe reader by Ch. 4, once goals and management processes have been described. All that matters forrs section is that a difference between goals and perturbance be noted by the reader. Astate perturbance is not a goal, but it arises out of the processing of goals. In Ch. 7, arelation00 perturbance and "emotion" is discussed. 43 . Sloman says of certain moods that they are "persistent states with dispositional power to color and modify a host of other states and processes. Such moodscan39061-6 be caused by cognitive events with semantic content, though they need not be.[...]0-64000 their control function does not require specific semantic content, though theycan0371-62 cognitive processes that do involve semantic content." (Sloman, 1992b Section 6).A 39642 view is taken in (Oatley, 1992). To be more precise, moods are temporary control stateswhich9881-5 the prominence of some motivators while decreasing others. In particular, they affectthe 41330-5 that certain "goal generators" are triggered. Moreover, moods affect the valenceofce 39476 evaluations, and the likelihood of affective evaluations (perhaps by modifying thresholdsofsholds 42 that trigger evaluations). It is not yet clear whether moods as defined here are9531 - or whether they merely emerge as side-effects of functional processes. . A reflex is a ballistic form of behaviour that can be specified by a narrow setw rules based on input integration and a narrow amount of internal state. There aretwo0981 of reflexes: simple reflexes and fixed action patterns. A simple reflex involves oneaction,-43000 a fixed action pattern involves a collection of actions. Usually, at most only asmall-4120 of perceptual feedback influences reflex action. This would require a definit...

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in scientific inference, statistics, and machine learning. It is also a central part of human learning, and a task that people perform remarkably well given its notorious difficulties. People can learn causal structure in various settings, from diverse forms of data: observations of the co-occurrence frequencies between causes and effects, interactions between physical objects, or patterns of spatial or temporal coincidence. These different modes of learning are typically thought of as distinct psychological processes and are rarely studied together, but at heart they present the same inductive challenge—identifying the unobservable mechanisms that generate observable relations between variables, objects, or events, given only sparse and limited data. We present a computational-level analysis of this inductive problem and a framework for its solution, which allows us to model all these forms of causal learning in a common language. In this framework, causal induction is the product of domain-general statistical inference guided by domain-specific prior knowledge, in the form of an abstract causal theory. We identify 3 key aspects of abstract prior knowledge—the ontology of entities, properties, and relations that organizes a domain; the plausibility of specific causal relationships; and the functional form of those relationships—and show how they provide the constraints that people need to induce useful causal models from sparse data.

This paper presents a case study of 3- to 9-year-old children's concepts of size, weight, density, matter, and material kind. Our goal was to examine two claims: (1) that individual concepts undergo differentiation during development; and (2) that young children's concepts are embedded in theory-like structures. To make progress on the first issue, we needed to specify in representational terms what an undifferentiated concept is like and in what sense this undifferentiated concept is a parent of the more differentiated concepts. Our strategy was to use a model of conceptual differentiation suggested by the history of science to guide our search for evidence. In this model, undifferentiated concepts, like differentiated concepts, can be analyzed in terms of their component properties, features, or dimensions. The key difference is that an undifferentiated concept unites certain components which will subsequently be analyzed as components of distinct concepts, and that the undifferentiated concept is embedded in a different theoretical structure from the differentiated concepts. In our study, the same group of 78 children (18 3-year-olds, 18 4-year-olds, 18 5-year-olds, 12 6-7-year-olds, and 12 8-9-year-olds) were given a range of tasks probing their understanding of size, weight, and density; a

I present D cognitive model of the humon ability lo acquire c.us.I relotionshipr. I report on experimental evidence demonrtroting that human leornerr acquire occwote cwxd relationships more rapidly when training examples oreconrirtent with o general theory of cwsolity. This article describes o learning procerr that uses o general theory of causality OS background knowledge. The leorning pro-cess, which I cdl theory-driven learning (TDL), hypothesizes cw~a1 relationships consistent both with observed doto and the general theory of courolity. TDL accounts for data on both the rote a+ which humon learners acquire couscll relo-tionrhips, and the types of COUSJ relationships they acquire. Experiments with TDL demonrtrote the odvontoge of TDL for acquiring cowa relationships over similarity-bored opproacher to learning: Fewer examples ore required to loom an acc~rote relotionrhio. 1.

The dynamics model, which is based on L. Talmy’s (1988) theory of force dynamics, characterizes causation as a pattern of forces and a position vector. In contrast to counterfactual and probabilistic models, the dynamics model naturally distinguishes between different cause-related concepts and explains the induction of causal relationships from single observations. Support for the model is provided in experiments in which participants categorized 3-D animations of realistically rendered objects with trajectories that were wholly determined by the force vectors entered into a physics simulator. Experiments 1–3 showed that causal judgments are based on several forces, not just one. Experiment 4 demonstrated that people compute the resultant of forces using a qualitative decision rule. Experiments 5 and 6 showed that a dynamics approach extends to the representation of social causation. Implications for the relationship between causation and time are discussed.

Five studies investigated (a) children’s ability to use the dependent and independent probabilities of events to make causal inferences and (b) the interaction between such inferences and domain-specific knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers used patterns of dependence and independence to make accurate causal inferences in the domains of biology and psychology. Experiment 2 replicated the results in the domain of biology with a more complex pattern of conditional dependencies. In Experiment 3, children used evidence about patterns of dependence and independence to craft novel interventions across domains. In Experiments 4 and 5, children’s sensitivity to patterns of dependence was pitted against their domain-specific knowledge. Children used conditional probabilities to make accurate causal inferences even when asked to violate domain boundaries. The past two decades of research have demonstrated that young children understand cause and effect in a wide range of contexts. By the age of 4, children’s folk physics includes knowledge about the causal relationship between object properties and object motion

Research suggests that causal judgment is influenced primarily by counterfactual or covariational reasoning. In contrast, the author of this article develops judgment dissociation theory (JDT), which predicts that these types of reasoning differ in function and can lead to divergent judgments. The actuality principle proposes that causal selections focus on antecedents that are sufficient to generate the actual outcome. The substitution principle proposes that ad hoc categorization plays a key role in counterfactual and covariational reasoning such that counterfactual selections focus on antecedents that would have been sufficient to prevent the outcome or something like it and covariational selections focus on antecedents that yield the largest increase in the probability of the outcome or something like it. The findings of 4 experiments support JDT but not the competing counterfactual and covariational accounts. If causation is the cement of the universe, as the philosopher David Hume (1740/1938) put it, then it is fair to say that causal knowledge is the cement that binds together each person’s representational universe. Causal reasoning—the process that generates this glue—confers many functional advantages. In virtually every sphere of human interest, our abilities to learn and categorize

How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence of delay on adult human causal judgments is mediated by experimentally induced assumptions about the timeframe of the causal relation in question, as suggested by Einhorn & Hogarth (1986). Causal judgments generally decreased when a delay separated cause and effect. This decrease was less pronounced when the thematic context of the causal relation induced participants to expect a delay. Experiment 3 ruled out an alternative explanation of the effect based on variations of cue and outcome saliencies, and showed that detrimental effects of delay are reduced even more when instructions explicitly mentioned the timeframe of the causal relation in question. Knowledge thus mediates the impact of

We describe an incremental learning algorithm, called theory-driven learning, that creates rules to predict the effect of actions. Theory-driven learning exploits knowledge of regularities among rules to constrain learning. We demonstrate that this knowledge enables the learning system to rapidly converge on accurate predictive rules and to tolerate more complex training data. An algorithm for incrementally learning these regularities is described and we provide evidence that the resulting regularities are sufficiently general to facilitate learning in new domains. The results demonstrate transfer from one domain to another can be achieved by deliberately overgeneralizing rules in one domain and biasing the learning algorithm to create new rules that specialize these overgeneralizations in other domains.