Mediation analysis, or more generally models with direct and indirect effects, are commonly used in the behavioral sciences. As we show in our illustrative example, traditional methods of mediation analysis that omit confounding variables can lead to systematically biased direct and indirect effects, even in the context of a randomized experiment. Therefore, several definitions of causal effect...

The previous studies about the maintenance systems were dealt with defining the evaluation criteria, grouping them, and using different techniques for evaluating. The main problem is that maintenance subsystems and the relationship between and within them in order to a reliable evaluation have never been identified before.The contribution of this study is realizing the four maintenance su...

The previous studies about the maintenance systems were dealt with defining the evaluation criteria, grouping them, and using different techniques for evaluating. The main problem is that maintenance subsystems and the relationship between and within them in order to a reliable evaluation have never been identified before.The contribution of this study is realizing the four maintenance su...

In the Michotte task, a ball (X) moves toward a resting ball (Y). In the moment of contact, X stops und Y starts moving. Previous studies have shown that subjects tend to view X as the causal agent ("X launches Y") rather than Y ("Y stops X"). Moreover, X tends to be attributed more force than Y (force asymmetry), which contradicts the laws of Newtonian mechanics. Recent theories of force asymm...

Associative and causal reasoning accounts are probably the two most influential types of accounts of causal reasoning processes. Only causal reasoning accounts predict certain asymmetries between predictive (i.e., reasoning from causes to effects) and diagnostic (i.e., reasoning from effects to causes) inferences regarding cue-interaction phenomena (e.g., the overshadowing effect). In the exper...

The causal network represents the knowledge related to the dependency relationship between all attributes. If the causal network is available, the dependency relationship can be employed to estimate the missing values for improving the estimation performance. However, the previous method had a limitation in that it did not consider the bidirectional characteristic of the causal network. The pro...

The goal of the present set of studies is to explore the boundary conditions of category transfer in causal learning. Previous research has shown that people are capable of inducing categories based on causal learning input, and they often transfer these categories to new causal learning tasks. However, occasionally learners abandon the learned categories and induce new ones. Whereas previously...

According to the causal power view, two core constraints-that causes occur independently (i.e., no confounding) and influence their effects independently-serve as boundary conditions for causal induction. This study investigated how violations of these constraints modulate uncertainty about the existence and strength of a causal relationship. Participants were presented with pairs of candidate ...