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Moderators
·Gloria Origgi
·Anne Reboul
Guest Panel
·David Eagleman
·York Hagmayer
·Daniel Povinelli
·Juan Rosas
·Laurie Santos
·Michael Waldmann
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David Hume famously claimed that causality is the cement of the universe. Today, we can re-interpret his claim by saying that causality is the cognitive cement of the universe. It is indeed a central notion in the representation of action that governs the observed behaviour in many different species. It links eventualities and predicts the consequences of action. It is the origin of behaviours that allow animals, notably human animals, to act upon and thus shape their environments. Causality is also the cognitive basis for the acquisition and the use of categories and concepts in the child. As such, it is the basis for rationality.
The workshop will bring together psychologists, philosophers, primatologists, linguists to explore the difference between animal and human causality, the role of language in shaping our causal reasoning as well as the role of association and memory in causal understanding.
Starting from March 1st 2005, a new paper will be open to discussion every two weeks.
This workshop is organized by the Institute for Cognitive Science in Lyon and the University of Geneva. In partnership with
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Causal Maps and Bayes Nets. A cognitive and computational account of causal learning and therory formation
Alison Gopnik
We have proposed that children's intuitive theories are 'Causal maps" , coherent representations of the causal relations among events. The Bayes net formalism is a computational way of representing and learning causal maps. Other animals appear to have an understanding that their own interventions can have causal effects,(as in operant conditioning) and independently can detect correlations among events in the world that signal causality (as in classical conditioning). However, they do not seem to put these two kinds of knowledge together to form causal maps.
Date of publication: 5 December 2006
Expressing Causality in Natural Language. A Pragmatic Perspective
Jacques Moeschler
This paper is devoted to the semantics and the pragmatics of causal constructions in natural language, mainly causative constructions, causative predicates and causal discourses with and without connective. I will argue that the representation of causality in discourse (the order effect-cause) is connected to the semantics of causal constructions, whose necessary argument is the patient (of the effect) and whose predicate denotes the resulting state of the causal event.
Date of publication: 25 March 2006
The Possible Influence of Perception of Causal Events on the Development of “if P then Q” Conditionals and Causal Reasoning
Peter Ford F. Dominey
This note will address the development of a generalized 'if P then Q’ schema based on accumulated real-world experience with the perception of causal events, in a constructionist context.
Date of publication: 15 February 2006
Causality vs. Explanation. Objective Relations vs. Subjective Interests.
Denis Hilton
I will argue that a strong distinction needs to be made between causal attribution and causal explanation. Whereas causal attribution is a cognitive process that involves referring an event to its source, whether it be a painting to its author, or an event to its origin, explanation is a three-place predicate describing a social interaction whereby someone explains something to someone else. As such causal explanation must obey the rules of conversation: A good explanation must be probably true, informative given an interlocutor?s state of knowledge, relevant to her interests, and expressed clearly. Whereas causality is objective, explanation is subjective (or intersubjective) in nature.
Date of publication: 16 January 2006
Delusion as an abnormal causal reasoning process. A search for a common ground in schizophrenia and dementia in older people
Sebastien Carnicella
Philippe Oberling
Delusion is an abnormal causal reasoning, whose process seems rooted in the inability to compute probability estimates (contingency judgment). We will analyse the psychological and neurobiological substrates of such a defect in both human and non-human species in order to provide an unitary framework of delusion disorders.
Date of publication: 8 December 2005
Associative Learning in Animals and Humans
Leyre Castro
Edward A. Wasserman
No one would dispute that humans are able to learn causal relationships. But do animals also possess this capacity? Both humans and animals have been subjected to similar evolutionary histories and they currently experience common survival demands: to predict and control the environment. Close correspondence between animal and human cognition might therefore not be at all farfetched. We propose that associative learning theories provide an applicable and promising viewpoint from which to understand many of the phenomena observed in animal conditioning and human causality learning.
Date of publication: 14 November 2005
Causal Inferences. Evolutionary Domains and Neural Systems
Clark Barrett
Pascal Boyer
Causal perception is a domain in which cognitive neuroscience studies and developmental psychology findings should be confronted. We still have no good description of the neural correlates of such simple causal thinking as
connecting two events because of temporal contiguity. In particular, this causal binding of events could be operated either by specialised, modality specific low-level systems or higher-level contingency detection, or both.
It would be useful to examine how developmental results illuminate this question.
Date of publication: 15 October 2005
Death as an Empirical Backdoor to the Representation of Mental Causality
Jesse M. Bering
Investigating peoples’ understanding of death may help to disentangle the complex relationship between the causal construals of self and other. From a simulationist perspective of other minds, because representations of postmortem mental states cannot be informed by firsthand experience with personal death, theoretical constructs dealing with the self and others’ minds after death suffer from the logical impoverishment of hypothesis disconfirmation. As lamented by the Spanish philosopher de Unamuno, “the effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing” (1954, p. 38). Simulation constraints may lead to a number of telltale errors, namely Type I errors (inferring mental states when in fact there are none), regarding the psychological status of dead agents. But even if one does not embrace simulation theory, reasoning about the fate of minds after death in a materialist fashion is problematic.
Date of publication: 3 October 2005
Thinking About Action. The Logic of Intervention in Reasoning and Decision Making
Steven Sloman
The fundamental idea of the causal modeling framework is that people represent causal systems by decomposing them into autonomous mechanisms that support intervention, both actual interventions on the world and counterfactual interventions in imagination. I will discuss the adequacy of this view as a description of human behavior in one or more of three domains: reasoning, decision making, and learning.
Date of publication: 5 September 2005
Inferring Causality and Making Predictions. Some Misconceptions in the Animal and Human Learning Literature
Helena Matute
Miguel A. Vadillo
A common assumption in studies on associative learning is that inferring causal relations, assessing predictive relations, and making predictions are closely related processes. In spite of the interdependencies between them, evidence (and simple intuition) indicates that people perform these processes differently and that they cannot be attributable to a common, single underlying mechanism. As we will show, this evidence has both methodological and theoretical implications.
Date of publication: 20 June 2005
Left with the association, naked as if it were? Ideas from honeybee learning
Martin Giurfa
The brain of a honeybee contains only 960 000 neurons and its volume represents only 1 mm3. However, it supports impressive behavioural capabilities. Honeybees are equipped with sophisticated sensory systems and have well developed learning and memory capacities, whose essential mechanisms do not differ drastically from those of vertebrates. But, which regularities can honeybees extract from their environment besides those underlying simple forms of associative learning? Here, I focus on non-elemental forms of learning by honeybees. I show that bees exhibit learning abilities that have been traditionally ascribed to a restricted portion of vertebrates, as they go beyond simple stimulus–stimulus or response–stimulus associations.
Date of publication: 6 June 2005
Causality in Non-Humans
Jennifer Vonk
We have recently argued that one fundamental difference between the conceptual systems of humans and other primates may be that humans alone are capable of reasoning about ‘imperceptibles’, defined as abstract theoretical constructs that can not be directly perceived through the senses. One particular class of ‘imperceptibles’ is the class of constructs that indexes causal forces. Although non-humans are extremely keen observers of perceptual features in the environment, and appear to understand the role of observable contingencies in the outcome of various events, we argue that they do not posit the existence of causal forces underlying these observable behaviors and events. Non-humans may not reason about ‘imperceptibles’, (including causal forces), because of a second key distinction between human and non-human conceptual systems; humans alone strive to explain as well as to predict events. This second distinction, which is inextricably tied to the first, may inspire a fruitful avenue of research in comparative psychology.
Date of publication: 23 May 2005
Physical causality in human infants
Susan Hespos
I would like to focus on whether there is specificity in causal cognition and how language influences this ability. Data from preverbal infants suggest that there is a set of perceptual and conceptual capacities that are common to everyone and rich enough to capture the core meanings expressed by any language. Language learning develops by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of meaning.
Date of publication: 10 May 2005
Do young children possess dinstinct causalities for the three core domains of thought?
Kayoko Inagaki
Giyoo Hatano & Kayoko Inagaki
A growing number of developmentalists agree that even young children possess coherent bodies of knowledge about a few important aspects of the world and that naive physics, psychology and biology are surely included among them. The acquisition of these core domains of thought is believed to be early, easy, and almost universal. How early do young children possess these naive theories of the world? Do they acquire three distinct causalities for these domains approximately at the same time? In the first half of this paper we discuss these issues. Our tentative conclusion is: whereas even three-year-olds have surely acquired and use differentially causalities for naive physics and psychology, a causal explanatory framework unique for biological properties and processes is established a little later.
In the last half of the paper we speculate how young children can acquire these characteristic causal devices.
Date of publication: 26 April 2005
Causal logic and the intentional stance
John Watson
Dennett introduced the concept of the 'intentional stance' as a
strategy used by humans in their coping with the behavior of each other and
with the behavior of complex animals. This stance attributes mental states
as causal factors for the behavior being explained or predicted.
In this paper, I argue that
the intentional stance may well be more than a pragmatic choice. It can be
viewed as a logically necessary choice given certain observed behavior and
the causal logic of a primitive 'determinist stance.' Implications and
potential assessment of this logical trigger are discussed.
Date of publication: 11 April 2005
Consciousness, Intentionality and Causality
Walter Freeman
On the basis of brain dynamics I conceive and describe causality as our phenomenological experience of the intention-action-perception-assimilation cycle that underlies all human knowledge, and infer that causality is not a property or law of the material world but a quale and percept derived in the brain.
Date of publication: 14 March 2005
Similarities and differences between human and nonhuman causal cognition
Anne Reboul
Hume noted that causality was inductively inferred by humans on the basis of three factors: spatio-temporal contiguity of cause and effect, contingency of the effect to the cause and precedence of the cause. He also noted that the inductive basis of causality was the association of the cause and the effect. The three factors which he saw as triggering the notion of a causal link are very near to those used in analyses of associative learning in animals. However, most researchers on animal cognition wouldn't want to claim that causal cognition in nonhuman animals is equivalent to its human counterpart. Given the similarities, what are the differences and where do they come from?
Date of publication: 28 February 2005
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