Casual Cognition end of semester question
1. Briefly explain how the Blicket detector paradigm probes children’s causal thinking,
and describe one of the empirical results that have resulted from this paradigm.
2. Why are cases of overdetermination a challenge for dependency theories of
causation?
3. Temporal contiguity, reliability, predictability, and order have all been shown to
shape causal judgments in human adults. Pick one of these temporal factors and
describe how a relevant experiment showed this.
4. What would be an efficient strategy for determining which one switch on a basement fusebox controls an upstairs bathroom light? Describe the steps of the strategy and explain why it is efficient. Can you think of any situation in which it would be suboptimal?
5. Using an example, explain why distinct hypotheses about causal structure cannot
always be distinguished with interventions that only fix a single component of the
relevant causal system at a time. What intervention strategy would allow you to
distinguish hypotheses in this case and how does it do so?
6. What do each of the four experiments in Kemp, Goodman & Tenenbaum (2010)
demonstrate about how priors shape our causal judgments?
7. How did Bramley, Mayrhofer, Gerstenberg & Lagnado (2017) test active learning in a continuous time setting? In their experiment, were participants better at using
interventions to identify the structure of cyclic or acyclic causal systems in this
experiment? What factors might explain this difference and why?
8. What combinations of base rate and causal power are probable under the generic
causal priors proposed by Lu et al (2008)? Relative to Lu et al’s proposal, what
differences did Yeung and Griffiths (2015) observe in their empirical estimation of
people’s priors? What, if anything, does this tell us about causal cognition?
9. What is the difference between a statistical causal claim and an actual causal claim?
Explain why one is more relevant for choosing between possible actions, and the
other more relevant for attributing responsibility.
10. Describe a behavioural study you learned about outside this course that finds
evidence for a causal relationship between two or more variables. What steps did the
researchers take in designing the experiment to ensure their conclusions are reliable
and generalisable? Do you think they were successful?
