The role of temporal factors and prior knowledge in causal learning and judgment

Causal relationships are all around us: wine causes stains; matches cause flames; foods cause allergic reactions. Next to language, it is hard to imagine a cognitive process more indicative of human intelligence than causal reasoning. To understand how people accomplish these feats, two major questions must be addressed: how do people acquire knowledge of causal relationships (causal learning), and how do people use that knowledge to make predictions and draw inferences (causal judgment)? The first part of this thesis is concerned with causal learning, and draws on the foundation of Bayesian inferential frameworks (e.g., Tenenbaum, Griffiths, & Kemp, 2006) to explain how observable data can be used to infer causal relationships between events. I will argue that rapid causal learning from small samples can be understood as rational inference over a representation of causality that includes a temporal delay between cause and effect. Experimentally, I show that people learn causal relationships faster when the temporal delay between cause and effect is less variable, just as is predicted by a rational statistical model of event causation. I argue that people's tendency to learn better from short delays is an artifact of the fact that short delays are inherently less variable.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Krynski, Tevye Rachelson

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joshua B. Tenenbaum.

• Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/37967
• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Identifier URI

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/37967

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/37967