Causal imprinting in causal structure learning.
By Eric G. Taylor, Woo-Kyoung Ahn. 2012
20 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Suppose one observes a correlation between two events, B and C, and infers that B causes C. Later one discovers that event A explains away the correlation between B and C. Normatively, one should now dismiss or weaken the belief that B causes C. Nonetheless, participants in the current study who observed a positive contingency between B and C followed by evidence that B and C were independent given A, persisted in believing that B causes C. The authors term this difficulty in revising initially learned causal structures “causal imprinting.” Throughout four experiments, causal imprinting was obtained using multiple dependent measures and control conditions. A Bayesian analysis showed that causal imprinting may be normative under some conditions, but causal imprinting also occurred in the current study when it was clearly non-normative. It is suggested that causal imprinting occurs due to the influence of prior knowledge on how reasoners interpret later evidence. Consistent with this view, when participants first viewed the evidence showing that B and C are independent given A, later evidence with only B and C did not lead to the belief that B causes C.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology, History and Philosophy of Science
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
- Kimberley J. Bartholomew
- Sebastiano Costa
- Nikos Ntoumanis
- Eric Mandelbaum
- J. Reeve
- Dana Perlman
- J. Duda
- Robert J. Vallerand
In History and Philosophy of Science
Citations in the corpus
- Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune system (2018, background): “Nevertheless, if one looks in the right way, one can find belief perseverance in many causal learning paradigms.13 For instance, subjects in Taylor and Ahn (2012) were tasked with learning the causal connections between fictitious diseases.”
- Predicting the brighter and darker sides of interpersonal relationships: Does psychological need thwarting matter? (2015, result): “Similar to studies by Gardner et al. (2012) and Taylor and Ahn (2012), only participants who had 85 % or more of their previous mTurk assignments completed, as shown by the website statistics, were allowed to participate.”