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.

Words, kinds and causal powers: A theory theory perspective on early naming and categorization. For some twenty-five years, the prevailing theories of categorization in philosophy have invoked the idea of “kinds ” (Putnam, 1975; Kripke, 1972). When we look at how adults use words to refer to categories of things we find that they only rarely categorize objects on the basis of their common properties. Instead, adults seem to categorize objects together when they believe that they belong to the same “kind”; that is, that they share some common, abstract “essence.” Psychological investigations of adults have largely confirmed these philosophical intuitions, adults do seem to group objects together based on “kinds ” rather than properties (Murphy &

Design history function (i.e., what an artifact was made for) is a central aspect of artifact conceptualization. A generally accepted explanation is that design history is central because it is the root cause for many other artifact properties. In Exp. 1, an inference task allowed us to probe participants ‘ causal models, and then to use them when making predictions for Exp. 2. Design history was, in fact, part of what participants viewed as conceptually relevant. Predictions for Exp. 2 were derived using the currently most comprehensive theory about how causal knowledge affects categorization. Our results show that though participants used design history, functional outcome and physical structure to conceptualize artifacts, the effect of design history was independent from knowledge of physical structure and functional outcome. This result is inconsistent with a causal knowledge explanation of design history‘s conceptual centrality.

The literature on concept development is highly contentious because there is a lot at stake. The processes that give rise to categories are at the very core of how we understand human cognition. In broad strokes, the debate is about whether categories reflect internal representations that are highly stable symbolic proposition-like and manipulated via logical operators or, whether they are probabilistic, context-dependent, and derived from bundles of correlated features and ordinary processes of perceiving and remembering (for reviews, see, Komatsu, 1992; Murphy & Medin, 1989; E. Smith, 1989; E. Smith & Medin, 1981. The literature appears to cycle through these two classes of accounts, advancing with each pass through but never quite leaving these two general points of view. Many of the contentious issues in the developmental literature on concepts and categories are variants of this debate. Accordingly, this review begins with a brief history of theories of categories. This is as history of back-and-forth transitions between a focus on more the more stable and the more probabilistic aspects of categories and it is a debate that is not resolved. However, by either view, categories result from internal representations that capture the structure in the world. Accordingly, the review of the developmental literature is organized with respect to recent advances in understanding outside-the-mind factors that organize and recruit the cognitive processes that create categories: the statistical regularities in the learning environment, the cognitive tasks and the nested time scales of the internal processes they recruit, and the body which is the interface between the external world and cognition. Back – and – forth theories. 2 Traditionally, categories are viewed as discrete bounded things that are stable over time and context. In this view, categories are enduringly real, object-like, truly out there in the world and also in our heads. Thus, theorists in this tradition write about categories being acquired, discovered, and possessed. The boundedness and stability expected of categories is well exemplified in the following quote from Keil (1994): Shared mental structures are assumed to be constant across repeated categorizations of the same set of instances and different from other categorizations. When I think