Contiguity and covariation in human causal inference

Contiguity and covariation in human causal inference.

Nearly every theory of causal induction assumes that the existence and strength of causal relations needs to be inferred from observational data in the form of covariations. The last few decades have seen much controversy over exactly how covariations license causal conjectures. One consequence of this debate is that causal induction research has taken for granted that covariation information i...

Causal inference in studies and medical articles

This article has no abstract.

Knowledge mediates the timeframe 1 Running head: TEMPORAL CONTIGUITY IN CAUSAL INDUCTION Knowledge mediates the timeframe of covariation assessment in human causal induction

How do humans discover causal relations when the effect is not immediately observable? Previous experiments have uniformly demonstrated detrimental effects of outcome delays on causal induction. These findings seem to conflict with everyday causal cognition, where humans can apparently identify long-term causal relations with relative ease. Three experiments investigated whether the influence o...

Covariation in natural causal induction.

The covariation component of everyday causal inference has been depicted, in both cognitive and social psychology as well as in philosophy, as heterogeneous and prone to biases. The models and biases discussed in these domains are analyzed with respect to focal sets: contextually determined sets of events over which covariation is computed. Moreover, these models are compared to our probabilist...

Beyond Covariation 1 Beyond covariation: Cues to causal structure