Humans routinely make inductive generalizations about unobserved features of objects. Previous accounts of inductive reasoning often focus on inferences about a single object or feature: accounts of causal reasoning often focus on a single object with one or more unobserved features, and accounts of property induction often focus on a single…

Studied a way of constraining feature centrality, the causal status of features in a category through 6 experiments involving 204 undergraduate students. Results show that the causal status effect is deeply rooted in many aspects of the categorization process. Causal knowledge is shown to affect categorization by determining feature centrality.…

The standard approach guiding research on the relationship between categories and causality views categories as reflecting causal relations in the world. We provide evidence that the opposite direction also holds: categories that have been acquired in previous learning contexts may influence subsequent causal learning. In three experiments we show…