{"pk":26205,"title":"Causal Reasoning in Infants and Adults: Revisiting backwards-blocking","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Causal learning is a fundamental ability that enables human\nreasoners to learn about the complex interactions in the world\naround them. The available evidence with children and adults,\nhowever, suggests that the mechanism or set of mechanisms\nthat underpins causal perception and causal reasoning are not\nwell understood; that is, it is unclear whether causal\nperception and causal reasoning are underpinned by a\nBayesian mechanism, associative mechanism, or both. It has\nbeen suggested that a Bayesian mechanism, rather than an\nassociative mechanism, underpins causal reasoning because\nsuch a mechanism can better explain the putative backward-\nblocking finding in children and adults (e.g., Sobel,\nTenenbaum, & Gopnik, 2004). In this paper, we report two\nexperiments to examine to what extent infants and adults\nexhibit backward blocking and whether humans’ ability to\nreason about causal events is underpinned by an associative\nmechanism, a Bayesian mechanism, or both.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"causality; infants; adults; causal reasoning; causal\nlearning; causal perception; infant and child development"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/706146cv","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Deon","middle_name":"T.","last_name":"Benton","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pittsburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"H.","last_name":"Rakison","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Pittsburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26205/galley/15841/download/"}]}