FriSem

Ari Beller, PhD Student, Department of Psychology, Stanford University 

2021 Cognition Fall First-Year Project

Title:  How to ask "Why?": A Process Model for Causal Cognition

Abstract:  Causal reasoning is a critical component of human cognition. A broad, multi-disciplinary literature supports the claim that humans perform causal judgments by computing counterfactuals. However many questions about details of counterfactual thinking remain unanswered. How exactly do humans perform counterfactual reasoning? And how do these high level inferential capacities interact with and make use of other mental processes? We investigate these questions in an intuitive physics setting called Plinko. Plinko is a diagnostic inference task where participants perform inferences about physical events using counterfactual reasoning and their intuitive knowledge of the physical world. We collect participant judgment, response time, and eye-movement data, and we design a model that elaborates on the connections between these disparate behavioral signals. Our model brings together tools from the literature on intuitive physics and visual search, and produces behavior that we can compare directly against our human data. This framework allows us to test specific algorithmic hypotheses about the cognitive processes underlying behavior in Plinko, and helps us to refine our understanding of counterfactual inference and causal cognition.