Causation by omission is instantiated when an effect occurs from an absence, as in "The absence of nicotine causes withdrawal" or "Not watering the plant caused it to wilt." The phenomenon has been viewed as an insurmountable problem for process theories of causation, which specify causation in terms of conserved quantities, like force, but not…

A fundamental issue for theories of human induction is to specify constraints on potential inferences. For inferences based on shared category membership, an analogy, and/or a relational schema, it appears that the basic goal of induction is to make accurate and goal-relevant inferences that are sensitive to uncertainty. People can use source…

Causal considerations must be relevant for those making decisions. Whether to bring an umbrella or leave it at home depends on the causal consequences of these options. However, most current decision theories do not address causal reasoning. Here, the authors propose a causal model theory of choice based on causal Bayes nets. The critical ideas…

Leading accounts of judgment under uncertainty evaluate performance within purely statistical frameworks, holding people to the standards of classical Bayesian (A. Tversky & D. Kahneman, 1974) or frequentist (G. Gigerenzer & U. Hoffrage, 1995) norms. The authors argue that these frameworks have limited ability to explain the success and…

A. P. Blaisdell, K. Sawa, K. J. Leising, and M. R. Waldmann (2006) reported evidence for causal reasoning in rats. After learning through Pavlovian observation that Event A (a light) was a common cause of Events X (an auditory stimulus) and F (food), rats predicted F in the test phase when they observed Event X as a cue but not when they generated…

Theories typically emphasize affordances or intentions as the primary determinant of an object's perceived function. The HIPE theory assumes that people integrate both into causal models that produce functional attributions. In these models, an object's physical structure and an agent's action specify an affordance jointly, constituting the…