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.

"If, in voluntary action properly so-called, the act must be foreseen, it follows that no creature not endowed with divinatory power can perform an act voluntarily for the first time". There is quite a bit of information that William James (1890, p. 487) wanted to communicate to the reader with this sentence. First, he incidentally introduces the probably most common

Humans perform actions to reach particular goals, that is, to intentionally create or modify personally relevant events---we move our eyes to learn more about a novel event, reach for a cup to quench our thirst, and move our lips to share our thoughts with someone else. Accordingly, even primitive actions must involve some kind of planning, some sort of anticipatory control. Indeed, there are at least three defining features that the simplest behavioral acts share with more complex ones. First, all of them are planned in terms of anticipated goal events. In particular, the first step of action planning consists in specifying the features the action is intended to possess; this is achieved by activating the appropriate action-effect codes, i.e., sensory-motor assemblies controlling the production of those features. Action-effect codes emerge through the perception of movement-effect contingencies, and they are acquired from the first months in life on. Besides action planning they are involved in the perception of both one's own actions and actions of others. Second, selected features of an intended action need to be integrated into a coherent, durable action plan, which is achieved by temporarily "binding" distributed feature codes. Third, planning an action turns the cognitive system into a kind of reflex machinery, which facilitates the proper execution of the plan under appropriate circumstances. This involves the implementation of automatic stimulus-response associations and the increase of the salience of action-related situational information, thereby delegating action control to the environment.

This paper reviews recent approaches to human action planning and the cognitive representation of intentional actions. Evidence suggests that action planning takes place in terms of anticipated features of the intended goal, that is, in terms of action effects. These effects are acquired from early infancy on by registering contingencies between movements and perceptual movement outcomes. Co-occurrence of movements and effects leads to the creation of bidirectional associations between the underlying internal codes, thus establishing distributed perception-action networks subserving both perceiving external events and intentionally producing them. Action plans determine only the general, goal-relevant features of intended actions, while the fine-tuning is left to on-line sensory-motor processing. Action plans emerge from competition for action control between several factors: overlearned habits, perceptual events, and emotional influences, among others. Accordingly, action control represents a balance between personal intentions and wishes on the one hand and environmental affordances and demands on the other. KEYWORDS: action planning, intentional action, goal, perception and action, feedback, action effects, action control, will, priming, imitation, mirror neurons, emotion and action DOMAINS: behavioral psychology, cognition, development, learning and memory, motor processes, sensation and perception, neuroscience, behavior PLANNING AN ACTION Humans perform actions to reach goals, that is, to create or modify some event or state of affairs according to their intentions --- otherwise we would talk of movement but not action. Logically, then, intentional, goal-directed action presupposes some sort of (conscious or unconscious) anticipation of the intended goal event,...

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 &

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domaingeneral statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, the authors presented preschoolers with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard 2 stories in which 2 candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the

coactive scaffolding

The capacity for shared attention is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. We propose that the development of shared attention depends on a proper interaction of motivational biases and contingency learning mechanisms operating in an appropriately structured environment. Atypical contingency learning leads to deficits in shared attention as seen in children with autism. To test this theory, we describe a unique research effort that combines theoretically rigorous modeling techniques using both simulated and robotic learning systems with novel empirical investigations of social learning and development in infants and toddlers with and without developmental disabilities. We believe that studying embodied learning models, whose input data (from a real or virtual caregiver) is modeled after real infant-caregiver interactions, will lead to a better understanding of the development and dysfunction of shared attention.

The capacity for shared attention is a cornerstone of human social intelligence. We propose that the development of shared attention depends on a proper interaction of motivational biases and contingency learning mechanisms operating in an appropriately structured environment. Atypical contingency learning leads to deficits in shared attention as seen in children with autism. To test this theory, we describe a unique research effort that combines theoretically rigorous modeling techniques using both simulated and robotic learning systems with novel empirical investigations of social learning and development in infants and toddlers with and without developmental disabilities. We believe that studying embodied learning models, whose input data (from a real or virtual caregiver) is modeled after real infant-caregiver interactions, will lead to a better understanding of the development and dysfunction of shared attention. 1.

Adults recognize that if event A predicts event B, intervening on A might generate B. Research suggests that although preschoolers draw this inference much like adults, toddlers do not (Bonawitz et. al, 2010). Here we look at whether toddlers ’ failure is domain-general (i.e., they lack an adultlike concept of causality that integrates prediction, intervention, and agency) or domain-specific (i.e., toddlers have trouble recognizing some physical processes as causal but might succeed with psychological events). We showed toddlers (24 months) a block moving into a base, after which an effect occurred; we then gave children the block and asked them to generate the effect. Toddlers performed the intervention and predicted the outcome when the effect was psychological (a puppet laughing) but, replicating previous studies, not when the effect was physical (a toy activating). Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to the relative saliency of the psychological effect.