Causal Judgments Research Articles

Causation: Interactions between Philosophical Theories and Psychological Research

This article explores some ways in which philosophical theories of causation and empirical investigations into causal learning and judgment can mutually inform one another.

Vitalistic thinking in adults

Vitalistic thinking has traditionally been associated with reasoning about biological phenomena. The current research aimed to investigate a broader range of vitalistic thinking than previously studied. Esoteric notions of 'energy' are frequently used by individuals when making causal attributions for strange occurrences, and previous literature has linked such thinking with paranormal, magical, and superstitious beliefs. Two experiments are described that aim to investigate whether adults are vitalistic when asked to make causal judgments, and whether this can be predicted by thinking styles and prior paranormal belief. Experiment 1 asked participants to rate three causal options (one of which was vitalistic) for six vignettes. Scores on one dimension of paranormal belief (New Age Philosophy) and analytical thinking significantly predicted vitalism, but scores on intuitive thinking and Traditional Paranormal Beliefs did not. Experiment 2 extended the findings by asking participants to generate their own causal responses. Again, paranormal belief was found to be the best predictor of vitalism, but this time Traditional Paranormal Beliefs were associated with vitalistic responses whilst both intuitive and analytical thinking were unable to significantly predict classification. Results challenge previous findings, suggesting that vitalistic thinking may operate differently when applied to everyday causal reasoning.

Functional Brain Networks and White Matter Underlying Theory-of-Mind in Autism

Human beings constantly engage in attributing causal explanations to one's own and to others' actions, and theory-of-mind (ToM) is critical in making such inferences. Although children learn causal attribution early in development, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are known to have impairments in the development of intentional causality. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) study investigated the neural correlates of physical and intentional causal attribution in people with ASDs. In the fMRI scanner, 15 adolescents and adults with ASDs and 15 age- and IQ-matched typically developing peers made causal judgments about comic strips presented randomly in an event-related design. All participants showed robust activation in bilateral posterior superior temporal sulcus at the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) in response to intentional causality. Participants with ASDs showed lower activation in TPJ, right inferior frontal gyrus and left premotor cortex. Significantly weaker functional connectivity was also found in the ASD group between TPJ and motor areas during intentional causality. DTI data revealed significantly reduced fractional anisotropy in ASD participants in white matter underlying the temporal lobe. In addition to underscoring the role of TPJ in ToM, this study found an interaction between motor simulation and mentalizing systems in intentional causal attribution and its possible discord in autism.

Causation: Empirical Trends and Future Directions

AbstractEmpirical research has recently emerged as a key method for understanding the nature of causation, and our concept of causation. One thread of research aims to test intuitions about the nature of causation in a variety of classic cases. These experiments have principally been used to try to resolve certain debates within analytic philosophy, most notably that between proponents of transference and dependence views of causation. The other major thread of empirical research on our concept of causation has investigated the role that normative considerations play in causal judgments. These experimental results suggest that philosophical accounts of our concept of causation should take a broader view of what might be relevant. For both lines of research, we describe some of the significant experiments and outline key philosophical morals that have been drawn, all while pointing out various limitations. We conclude by considering other kinds of empirical research that should be philosophically interesting for those studying the nature of causation and our concept of causation. In particular, we point towards the need for philosophical research about causal perception, causal reasoning, and causal learning, as well as ways in which this research could play a role in prescriptive metaphysics.

Neural correlates of causality judgment in physical and social context—The reversed effects of space and time

The perception of causal relationships is crucial to understanding and interacting with our physical and social environment. However, whether the same or different neural processes are involved in perceiving physical and social causality is unknown. Therefore, this study is focused on commonalities and differences in the neural correlates of causality perception in both contexts. During fMRI data-acquisition, participants judged causal relationships of objects in two types of animated video clips (physical/social) with similar manipulations of temporal and spatial stimulus characteristics. Four conditions were analyzed in a two-factorial design [physical causal (PC), physical non-causal (PNC), social causal (SC), social non-causal (SNC)]. We found that higher angles and longer time delays led to decreasing judgments of causality in the physical context, whereas the same manipulations led to increasing judgments in the social context. Instead of a common network for causal judgments (PC>PNC∩SC>SNC), we found a reversed activation pattern for the factors context and judgment. PC and SNC [(PC>PNC)>(SC>SNC)] produced activations in the bilateral insula, the right angular and inferior frontal gyrus and the medial supplementary motor area. PNC and SC [(PC>PNC)<(SC>SNC)] produced activity in medial frontal, left superior temporal and anterior cingulate brain regions. Our data suggest, that the same brain regions contribute to the impression of physical and social causality. However, they demonstrate a reversed activation pattern that reflects the stimulus characteristics of the respective conditions. Thus, specific stimulus characteristics are crucial for the perception of causality.

The Role of Causal and Intentional Judgments in Moral Reasoning in Individuals with High Functioning Autism

In the present study, we investigated the ability to assign moral responsibility and punishment in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS), using non-verbal cartoons depicting an aggression, an accidental harm or a mere coincidence. Participants were asked to evaluate the agent's causal and intentional roles, his responsibility and the punishment he deserves for his action. Adults with HFA/AS did not differ in judgments of suffering and causality from adults with typical development. However, subtle difficulties with judgments of intentional action and moral judgments were observed in participants with HFA/AS. These results are discussed in the light of emerging studies that deal with integrity of moral reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

Age Differences in Contingency Judgement Linked to Perceptual Segregation

We demonstrate large differences in judging positive and null contingencies between younger and older adults with a task commonly used to explore cue competition in both contingency and causality judgements. The one-phase blocking task uses two cues, with separate contingencies with the same outcome. The age differences persisted even when participants knew in advance which of the two contingencies to judge. The age differences disappeared, however, when the stimulus display contained markers aiding perceptual segregation. We suggest that the age differences elicited in the one-phase blocking task are linked to decrements in perceptual segregation.

Modeling Social Causality and Responsibility Judgment in Multi-Agent Interactions

Social causality is the inference an entity makes about the social behavior of other entities and self. Besides physical cause and effect, social causality involves reasoning about epistemic states of agents and coercive circumstances. Based on such inference, responsibility judgment is the process whereby one singles out individuals to assign responsibility, credit or blame for multi-agent activities. Social causality and responsibility judgment are a key aspect of social intelligence, and a model for them facilitates the design and development of a variety of multi-agent interactive systems. Based on psychological attribution theory, this paper presents a domain-independent computational model to automate social inference and judgment process according to an agent’s causal knowledge and observations of interaction. We conduct experimental studies to empirically validate the computational model. The experimental results show that our model predicts human judgments of social attributions and makes inferences consistent with what most people do in their judgments. Therefore, the proposed model can be generically incorporated into an intelligent system to augment its social and cognitive functionality.

Out of sequence communications can affect causal judgement

In some practical uncertain situations decision makers are presented with described events that are out of sequence when having to make a causal attribution. A theoretical perspective concerning the causal coherence of the explanation is developed to predict the effect of this on causal attribution. Three experiments investigated the effect on causal judgement when the described order of events did not correspond to their causal order. Participants had to judge the relative probability of two possible causes of an outcome in scenarios in which presentation order varied. All three experiments found that there was a preference to judge that the cause associated with events described in causal order was more responsible for the outcome when events associated with one cause were interleaved in their presentation order with those from a second cause. This occurred when there was a strong causal relationship between events. The results were consistent with the causal coherence explanation.

Does Temporal Contiguity Moderate Contingency Learning in a Speeded Performance Task?

In four experiments, we varied the time between the onset of distracting nonwords and target colour words in a word-word version of the colour-word contingency learning paradigm. Contingencies were created by pairing a distractor nonword more often with one target colour word than with other colour words. A contingency effect corresponds to faster responses to the target colour word on high-contingency trials (i.e., distractor nonword followed by the target colour word with which it appears most often) than on low-contingency trials (i.e., distractor nonword followed by a target colour word with which it appears only occasionally). Roughly equivalent-sized contingency effects were found at stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 50, 250, and 450ms in Experiment 1, and 50, 500, and 1,000ms in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, a contingency effect was observed at SOAs of -50, -200, and -350ms. In Experiment 4, interstimulus interval (ISI) was varied along with SOA, and learning was equivalent for 200-, 700-, and 1,200-ms SOAs. Together, these experiments suggest that the distracting stimulus does not need to be presented in close temporal contiguity with the response to induce learning. Relations to past research on causal judgement and implications for further contingency learning research are discussed.

Causation in Perspective. Are All Causal Claims Equally Warranted?

In a paper ‘Causation in Context’ (2007) Peter Menzies has argued that the truth value of causal judgments is perspective-relative (i.e. their truth value does not depend entirely on mind-independent structures). His arguments are confined to causation as difference making (a term he uses to cover probabilistic, counterfactual and regularity views of causation). In this paper we first briefly present Menzies’ arguments. Then we show that perspective-relativity also holds for causation in the sense of process theories. These parts of the paper prepare the ground for the topic we really want to investigate: we want to find out whether this perspective-relativity leads to an epistemic predicament with respect to causal claims. The potential epistemic predicament we consider is that all causal claims would be equally warranted.

Context Modulates the Contribution of Time and Space in Causal Inference

Humans use kinematic temporal and spatial information from the environment to infer the causal dynamics (e.g., force) of an event. We hypothesize that the basis for these inferences are malleable and modulated by contextual temporal and spatial information. Specifically, the present research investigates whether the extent of a person’s ongoing experience with direct causal events (e.g., temporally contiguous and spatially continuous) alters their use of time and space in judgments of causality. Participants made inferences of causality on animated launching events depicting a blue ball colliding with and then “launching” a red ball. We parametrically manipulated temporal contiguity and spatial continuity by varying the duration of contact between the balls and the angle of the second ball’s movement. We manipulated participants’ level of exposure to direct causal events (i.e., events with no delay or angle change) between experiments (Experiment 1: 2%, Experiment 2: 25%, Experiment 3: 75%). We found that participants adjust the temporal and spatial parameters they use to judge causality to accommodate the context in which they apprehended launching events. Participants became more conservative in their use of temporal and spatial parameters to judge causality as their exposure to direct causal events increased. People use time and space flexibly to infer causality based on their ongoing experiences. Such flexibility in making causal inferences may have adaptive significance.

Assessing evidence for a common function of delay in causal learning and reward discounting.

Time occupies a central role in both the induction of causal relationships and determining the subjective value of rewards. Delays devalue rewards and also impair learning of relationships between events. The mathematical relation between the time until a delayed reward and its present value has been characterized as a hyperbola-like function, and increasing delays of reinforcement tend to elicit judgments or response rates that similarly show a negatively accelerated decay pattern. Furthermore, neurological research implicates both the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in both these processes. Since both processes are broadly concerned with the concepts of reward, value, and time, involve a similar functional form, and have been identified as involving the same specific brain regions, it seems tempting to assume that the two processes are underpinned by the same cognitive or neural mechanisms. We set out to determine experimentally whether a common cognitive mechanism underlies these processes, by contrasting individual performances on causal judgment and delay discounting tasks. Results from each task corresponded with previous findings in the literature, but no relation was found between the two tasks. The task was replicated and extended by including two further measures, the Barrett Impulsiveness Scale (BIS), and a causal attribution task. Performance on this latter task was correlated with results on the causal judgment task, and also with the non-planning component of the BIS, but the results from the delay discounting task was not correlated with either causal learning task nor the BIS. Implications for current theories of learning are considered.

A Quantum Probability Model of Causal Reasoning

People can often outperform statistical methods and machine learning algorithms in situations that involve making inferences about the relationship between causes and effects. While people are remarkably good at causal reasoning in many situations, there are several instances where they deviate from expected responses. This paper examines three situations where judgments related to causal inference problems produce unexpected results and describes a quantum inference model based on the axiomatic principles of quantum probability theory that can explain these effects. Two of the three phenomena arise from the comparison of predictive judgments (i.e., the conditional probability of an effect given a cause) with diagnostic judgments (i.e., the conditional probability of a cause given an effect). The third phenomenon is a new finding examining order effects in predictive causal judgments. The quantum inference model uses the notion of incompatibility among different causes to account for all three phenomena. Psychologically, the model assumes that individuals adopt different points of view when thinking about different causes. The model provides good fits to the data and offers a coherent account for all three causal reasoning effects thus proving to be a viable new candidate for modeling human judgment.

Human sensitivity to the magnitude and probability of a continuous causal relation in a video game.

Continuous causation, in which incremental changes in one variable cause incremental changes in another, has received little attention in the causal judgment literature. A video game was adapted for the study of continuous causality in order to examine the novel cues to causality that are present in these paradigms. The spatial proximity of an object to an "enemy detector" produced auditory responses as a function of the object's proximity. Participants' behavior was a function of the range of the effect's auditory sensitivity and the moment-to-moment likelihood of detection. This new paradigm provides a rich platform for examining the cues to causation encountered in the learning of continuous causal relations.

A common error term regulates acquisition but not extinction of causal judgments in people

In three experiments, we used the allergist task to examine the role of error correction mechanisms in the acquisition and extinction of causal judgments in people. Consistent with existing human and animal studies, acquisition of causal judgments was influenced by the discrepancy between the allergenic outcome and that predicted by all of the cues present on a trial (the "common error" term). However, in the present experiments, we failed to detect any evidence for the use of a common error term in extinction learning: Judgments of the allergenic properties of a cue were unaffected by the predictive value of the other cues present on a trial. This asymmetry in the use of a common error term in acquisition and extinction learning is inconsistent with previous animal studies and also with most models of associative learning. However, approaches that allow learning to be specific to a particular arrangement of elemental cues (context specific and state based) offer some explanation of the observed asymmetry.

Are Causal Structure and Intervention Judgments Inextricably Linked? A Developmental Study

The application of the formal framework of causal Bayesian Networks to children's causal learning provides the motivation to examine the link between judgments about the causal structure of a system, and the ability to make inferences about interventions on components of the system. Three experiments examined whether children are able to make correct inferences about interventions on different causal structures. The first two experiments examined whether children's causal structure and intervention judgments were consistent with one another. In Experiment 1, children aged between 4 and 8 years made causal structure judgments on a three-component causal system followed by counterfactual intervention judgments. In Experiment 2, children's causal structure judgments were followed by intervention judgments phrased as future hypotheticals. In Experiment 3, we explicitly told children what the correct causal structure was and asked them to make intervention judgments. The results of the three experiments suggest that the representations that support causal structure judgments do not easily support simple judgments about interventions in children. We discuss our findings in light of strong interventionist claims that the two types of judgments should be closely linked.

Hume's Two Definitions: The Procedural Interpretation

Hume scholars have long disputed how we should understand his famous "two definitions" of causation. A serious problem with existing accounts is that they fit uneasily with Hume's claim in the Treatise that the two definitions correspond to causation considered separately as a "natural" and as a "philosophical" relation. This paper advances a new interpretation of the two definitions, according to which they represent an account of two different psychological mechanisms that generate causal judgments. This interpretation is fully consistent with Hume's claim that the two definitions map onto his distinction between natural and philosophical relations, once that distinction is itself properly understood.

The role of the right parietal lobe in the perception of causality: a tDCS study

Inferring causality is a fundamental feature of human cognition that allows us to predict outcomes in everyday events. Here, we use direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate the role of the right parietal lobe in the perception of causal events. Based on the results of a previous fMRI investigation, we hypothesized that the right parietal lobe plays a specific role in the processing of spatial attributes that contribute to judgments of causality. In line with our hypothesis, we found polarization-dependent modulation of causal judgments and corresponding reaction times (RTs) for trials with increasing violation of spatial contiguity in launching events. This effect was further modulated by temporal violations, as the effect of tDCS on the use of spatial information for causality judgements was strongest for trials with high temporal violations. Thus, especially for ambiguous trials with regard to temporal patterns, cathodal stimulation led to more liberal causality judgments for trials with high angles in movement trajectory. Furthermore, we found faster RTs after anodal stimulation of the right parietal lobe. These findings suggest a reduced influence of spatial attributes on the perception of causality after cathode stimulation of the right parietal lobe and an increased processing efficiency after anodal stimuli of the same region. These data demonstrate polarization-dependent tDCS modulation of spatial processing mechanisms within the right parietal lobe that contribute to the perception of causality.

Making predictions from kinematics and causal intuitions: a dissociation between judged causality and imagined locations

To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of moving objects disappearing from sight, different sources of information can be exploited. Among them, the memory of its last visible position and movement, its inferred movement through time, and the general understanding of the causal relations between objects in the scene are particularly important. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog mental representations. To investigate the mental representation of imagined movements and their relation with our intuitions about the nature of the physical events, we used a novel experimental paradigm in which a causal attribution task was combined with a motion prediction task. Participants were instructed to imagine the trajectory of a moving object disappearing behind a screen and to estimate the degree to which the movement was launched by another moving object. To test the impact of causality, we modified a launching event by introducing either a temporal delay or a spatial interval between the movements. Compared to a situation in which the target object remained visible through its entire trajectory, participants were unable to precisely predict the actual position of the target when it was occluded. Futhermore, their predictions were misaligned with their judgment of causality: participants predicted the actual position of invisible moving objects better for events that they judged less causally correct than for events they judged more causally correct. To see if some other high-level physical representations could affect the prediction, we tilted the slope of the track such that the balls would either roll downward or upward, resulting in no obvious difference from the horizontal track condition. Overall, our data suggest that kinematics and cognitive parameters of imagined dynamical events do not merge into a unitary mental model simulating actual states of the world.