The Collider Principle in Causal Reasoning: Why the Monty Hall Dilemma Is So Hard.

The authors tested the thesis that people find the Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) hard because they fail to understand the implications of its causal structure, a collider structure in which 2 independent causal factors influence a single outcome. In 4 experiments, participants performed better in versions of the MHD involving competition, which emphasizes causality. This manipulation resulted in more correct responses to questions about the process in the MHD and a counterfactual that changed its causal structure. Correct responses to these questions were associated with solving the MHD regardless of condition. In addition, training on the collider principle transferred to a standard version of the MHD. The MHD taps a deeper question: When is knowing about one thing informative about another? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Seeing Versus Doing: Two Modes of Accessing Causal Knowledge.

The ability to derive predictions for the outcomes of potential actions from observational data is one of the hallmarks of true causal reasoning. We present four learning experiments with deterministic and probabilistic data showing that people indeed make different predictions from causal models, whose parameters were learned in a purely observational learning phase, depending on whether learners believe that an event within the model has been merely observed ("seeing") or was actively manipulated ("doing"). The predictions reflect sensitivity both to the structure of the causal models and to the size of their parameters. This competency is remarkable because the predictions for potential interventions were very different from the patterns that had actually been observed. Whereas associative and probabilistic theories fail, recent developments of causal Bayes net theories provide tools for modeling this competency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing Interactive Causal Influence.

The discovery of conjunctive causes--factors that act in concert to produce or prevent an effect--has been explained by purely covariational theories. Such theories assume that concomitant variations in observable events directly license causal inferences, without postulating the existence of unobservable causal relations. This article discusses problems with these theories, proposes a causal-power theory that overcomes the problems, and reports empirical evidence favoring the new theory. Unlike earlier models, the new theory derives (a) the conditions under which covariation implies conjunctive causation and (b) functions relating observable events to unobservable conjunctive causal strength. This psychological theory, which concerns simple cases involving 2 binary candidate causes and a binary effect, raises questions about normative statistics for testing causal hypotheses regarding categorical data resulting from discrete variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's attributions of intentions to an invisible agent.

Children ages 3-9 years were informed that an invisible agent (Princess Alice) would help them play a forced-choice game by "telling them, somehow, when they chose the wrong box," whereas a matched control group of children were not given this supernatural prime. On 2 unexpected event trials, an experimenter triggered a simulated unexpected event (i.e., a light turning on/off; a picture falling), and children's behavioral response to these events (i.e., moving their hand to the opposite box) was coded. Results showed a significant Age Group × Experimental Condition interaction; the only children to reliably alter their behavior in response to the unexpected events were the oldest children (M = 7 years 4 months), who were primed with the invisible agent concept. For children's posttest verbal explanations, also, only these children saw the unexpected events as being referential and declarative (e.g., "Princess Alice did it because I chose the wrong box"). Together, these data suggest that children may not regularly begin to see communicative signs as embedded in unexpected events until they are around 7 years of age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Content and Strategy in Syllogistic Reasoning.

Syllogistic reasoning has been investigated as a general deductive process (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; Revlis, 1975; Rips, 1994). However, several studies have demonstrated the role of cognitive strategies in this type of reasoning. These strategies focus on the method used by the participants (Ford, 1995; Gilhooly, Logie, Wetherick, & Wynn, 1993) and strategies related to different interpretations of the quantified premises (Roberts, Newstead, & Griggs, 2001). In this paper, we propose that content (as well as individual cognitive differences) is an important factor in inducing a certain strategy or method for syllogistic resolution. Specifically, we suggest that syllogisms with a causal conditional premise that can be extended by an agency premise induce the use of a conditional method. To demonstrate this, we carried out two experiments. Experiment 1 provided evidence that this type of syllogism leads participants to draw the predicted conditional conclusions, in contrast with control content syllogisms. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that the drawing of conditional conclusions is based on a causal conditional to an agent representation of the syllogism premises. These results support the role of content as inducing a particular strategy for syllogistic resolution. The implications of these results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reasoning About Conjunctive Probabilistic Concepts in Childhood.

While adults are known to exhibit biases when making conjunctive probability judgments, little is known about childhood competencies in this area. Participants (aged between four and five years, eight and ten years, and a group of young adults) attempted to select the more likely of two events, a single event, and a conjunctive event containing, as one of its components, the single event. The problems were such that the objective probabilities of the component events were potentially available. Children in both age groups were generally successful when the single event was likely. However, when it was unlikely, a majority of children rejected it, choosing the conjunctive event instead, thereby committing the conjunction fallacy. A substantial minority of adults also committed the fallacy under equivalent conditions. It is concluded that under certain conditions children are capable of normative conjunctive judgments but that the mechanisms underpinning this capacity remain to be fully understood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acting and Planning on the Basis of a False Belief: Its Effects on 3-Year-Old Children's Reasoning About Their Own False Beliefs.

This study examined 3-year-olds' explanations for actions of theirs that were premised on a false belief. In Experiment 1, children stated what they thought was inside a crayon box. After stating "crayons," they went to retrieve some paper to draw on. Children were then shown that the box contained candles and were asked to (a) state their initial belief and (b) explain their action of getting paper. Children who were unable to retrieve their false belief were unable to correctly explain their action. Experiments 2 and 3 ruled out several alternative interpretations for these findings. In Experiment 4, children planned and acted on their false belief. Again, children who were unable to retrieve their false belief were unable to correctly explain their action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Causal relations and feature similarity in children's inductive reasoning.

Four experiments examined the development of property induction on the basis of causal relations. In the first 2 studies, 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds, and adults were presented with triads in which a target instance was equally similar to 2 inductive bases but shared a causal antecedent feature with 1 of them. All 3 age groups used causal relations as a basis for property induction, although the proportion of causal inferences increased with age. Subsequent experiments pitted causal relations against featural similarity in induction. It was found that adults and 8-year-olds, but not 5-year-olds, preferred shared causal relations over strong featural similarity as a basis for induction. The implications for models of inductive reasoning and development are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reasoning From Inconsistency to Consistency.

This article presents a theory of how individuals reason from inconsistency to consistency. The theory is based on 3 main principles. First, individuals try to construct a single mental model of a possibility that satisfies a current set of propositions, and if the task is impossible, they infer that the set is inconsistent. Second, when an inconsistency arises from an incontrovertible fact, they retract any singularly dubious proposition or any proposition that is inconsistent with the fact; otherwise, they retract whichever proposition mismatches the fact. A mismatch can arise from a proposition that has only mental models that conflict with the fact or fail to represent it. Third, individuals use their causal knowledge-in the form of models of possibilities-to create explanations of what led to the inconsistency. A computer program implements the theory, and experimental results support each of its principles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Causal client models in selecting effective interventions: A cognitive mapping study.

An important reason to choose an intervention to treat psychological problems of clients is the expectation that the intervention will be effective in alleviating the problems. The authors investigated whether clinicians base their ratings of the effectiveness of interventions on models that they construct representing the factors causing and maintaining a client's problems. Forty clinical child psychologists drew causal models and rank ordered interventions according to their expected effectiveness for 2 cases. The authors found that different clinicians constructed different causal models for the same client. Also, the authors found low to moderate agreement about the effectiveness of different interventions. Nevertheless, the authors could predict clinicians' ratings of effectiveness from their individual causal models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets.

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 2- to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competition Between Antecedent and Between Subsequent Stimuli in Causal Judgments.

In the analysis of stimulus competition in causal judgment, 4 variables have been frequently confounded with respect to the conditions necessary for stimuli to compete: causal status of the competing stimuli (causes vs. effects), temporal order of the competing stimuli (antecedent vs. subsequent) relative to the noncompeting stimulus, directionality of training (predictive vs. diagnostic), and directionality of testing (predictive vs. diagnostic). In a factorial study using an overshadowing preparation, the authors isolated the role of each of these variables and their interactions. The results indicate that competition may be obtained in all conditions. Although some of the results are compatible with various theories of learning, the observation of stimulus competition in all conditions calls for a less restrictive reformulation of current learning theories that allows similar processing of antecedent and subsequent events, as well as of causes and effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The emergence of children's causal explanations and theories: Evidence from everyday conversation.

This research examines the content of explanations that 4 English-speaking children gave or asked for in everyday conversations recorded from 2? to 5 years of age. Analyses of nearly 5,000 codable explanations (identified by markers like why or because) focused on the entity targeted for explanation (e.g., person, animal, object), the explanatory mode of causal reasoning (e.g., psychological, physical), and interrelations between these elements. Children's explanations focused on varied entities (animals, objects, and persons) and incorporated diverse modes (psychological, physical, social-conventional, and even biological reasoning). Children's pairings of entities with explanatory modes suggest appropriately constrained yet flexible causal reasoning. These data are consistent with the hypothesis that young children draw on several complementary causal-explanatory theories to make sense of real-life events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociating Processes Supporting Causal Perception and Causal Inference in the Brain.

An understanding of relations between causes and effects is essential for making sense of the dynamic physical world. It has been argued that this understanding of causality depends on both perceptual and inferential components. To investigate whether causal perception and causal inference rely on common or on distinct processes, the authors tested 2 callosotomy (split-brain) patients and a group of neurologically intact participants. The authors show that the direct perception of causality and the ability to infer causality depend on different hemispheres of the divided brain. This finding implies that understanding causality is not a unitary process and that causal perception and causal inference can proceed independently. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Time as a guide to cause.

How do people learn causal structure? In 2 studies, the authors investigated the interplay between temporal-order, intervention, and covariational cues. In Study 1, temporal order overrode covariation information, leading to spurious causal inferences when the temporal cues were misleading. In Study 2, both temporal order and intervention contributed to accurate causal inference well beyond that achievable through covariational data alone. Together, the studies show that people use both temporal-order and interventional cues to infer causal structure and that these cues dominate the available statistical information. A hypothesis-driven account of learning is endorsed, whereby people use cues such as temporal order to generate initial models and then test these models against the incoming covariational data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgment dissociation theory: An analysis of differences in causal, counterfactual and covariational reasoning.

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. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theories of Conditional Reasoning: A Developmental Examination of Competing Hypotheses.

Children and adolescents were presented with problems that contained deontic (i.e., if action p is taken, then precondition q must be met) or causal (i.e., if event p occurs, then event q will transpire) conditionals and that varied in the ease with which alternative antecedents could be activated. Results showed that inferences were linked to the availability of alternative antecedents and the generation of "disabling" conditions (claims that the conditionals were false under specific circumstances). Age-related developments were found only on problems involving indeterminate inferences. Correlations among inferences differed for children and adolescents. The findings provide stronger support for domain-general theories than for domain-specific theories of reasoning and suggest, under some conditions, age-related changes in the roles of implicit and explicit processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessing the Causal Structure of Function.

Theories typically emphasize affordances or intentions as the primary determinant of an object's perceived function. The HIPE theory assumes that people integrate both into causal models that produce functional attributions. In these models, an object's physical structure and an agent's action specify an affordance jointly, constituting the immediate causes of a perceived function. The object's design history and an agent's goal in using it constitute distant causes. When specified fully, the immediate causes are sufficient for determining the perceived function--distant causes have no effect (the causal proximity principle). When the immediate causes are ambiguous or unknown, distant causes produce inferences about the immediate causes, thereby affecting functional attributions indirectly (the causal updating principle). Seven experiments supported HIPE's predictions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Temporal construal.

Construal level theory proposes that temporal distance changes people's responses to future events by changing the way people mentally represent those events. The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events (high-level construals) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events (low-level construals). The informational and evaluative implications of high-level construals, compared with those of low-level construals, should therefore have more impact on responses to distant-future events than near-future events. This article explores the implications of construal level theory for temporal changes in evaluation, prediction, and choice. The authors suggest that construal level underlies a broad range of evaluative and behavioral consequences of psychological distance from events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)