Causal Models: How People Think about the World and Its Alternatives

By Steven A. Sloman. 2005

577 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d022f6d2c2ed802f114ed05d3c791555911c1952

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Causal reasoning in a prediction task with hidden causes (2015, background): “Indeed, the processing of causal information appears to be deeply embedded in animal cognition (Sloman, 2005; Blaisdell et al., 2006); and studies in child development have shown that we learn to form and rely on causal knowledge early on in our lives (Gopnik et al., 2004; Meltzoff, 2007).”
Why ask why? Forward causal inference and reverse causal questions (2013, background): “They are a natural way to think (consider the importance of the word Why, or see Sloman, 2005, for further discussion of causal ideas in cognition).”
Explainable Reinforcement Learning Through a Causal Lens (2019, background): “As humans, we view the world through a causal lens (Sloman 2005), building mental models with causal relationships to act in the world, to understand new events and also to explain events.”
Evaluating everyday explanations (2017, background): “When explanations provide evidence in support of a causal mechanism (Sloman, 2005), that evidence should be evaluated independently to determine whether it is credible and relevant (Kuhn, 1991).”
A Model of Competing Narratives (2018, unknown): “Following the literature on probabilistic graphical models in Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Psychology (Cowell et al. (1999), Sloman (2005), Pearl (2009)), we represent such causal models by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs).”
Formalizing Neurath’s Ship: Approximate Algorithms for Online Causal Learning (2016, background): “Such representations enable humans to exploit their physical and social environments in flexible and inherently model-based ways (Dolan & Dayan, 2013; Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2007; Sloman, 2005).”
Dynamic inference and everyday conditional reasoning in the new paradigm (2013, unknown): “Such approaches are not inimical to the proposal that people represent probabilistic information in terms of the dependencies they describe as in Causal Bayes Nets (CBNs).”
Intuitive Theories (2020, background): “In contrast to BNs where the links between variables merely express statistical dependence, the links in a CBN express autonomous causal mechanisms (Sloman, 2005).”
Limits on simulation approaches in intuitive physics. (2021, unknown): “…(Forbus, 1984; Forbus & Gentner, 1983; Klenk & Forbus, 2009), abstract causal reasoning (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2007; Holmes & Wolff, 2010; Sloman, 2005; Wolff, 2007; Wolff & Barbey, 2015), analogy (Gentner, 1983; Gentner & Gentner, 1983), and pattern-matching approaches similar to…”
How People Explain Action (and Autonomous Intelligent Systems Should Too) (2017, background): “Such causes may be formalized using causal models (Halpern and Hitchcock 2013; Sloman 2005), but they must still be translated into verbal representations so the audience readily comprehends them.”
Causal Responsibility and Counterfactuals (2013, background): “Rather than search for a reductive definition, causality is accepted as a primitive notion, and the causal model framework formalizes and clarifies the relations between causal models, probability, interventions, and counterfactuals (see Pearl, 2000/2009; Sloman, 2005).”
Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory (2012, unknown): “…have used these representations to describe adult knowledge, in particular, causal knowledge (Lu, Yuille, Liljeholm, Cheng, & Holyoak, 2008; Sloman, 2005; Waldmann, Hagmayer, & Blaisdell, 2006), and these representations have been proposed as a way to characterize adult intuitive theories…”