Novel perspectives on the causal mind Experiments, modeling, and theory

This thesis presents research into human causal cognition using a variety of perspectives and methodologies. I surveyed the existing literature on causal cognition and identified shortcomings, paying particular attention to different methodologies (from psychology, cognitive science, logic, and philosophy). This text is subdivided into three parts, each of which presents work using novel methods in a different field. These fields are 1) experimental psychology, 2) computational cognitive modelling, and 3) philosophy. In part 1 I present two experiments on causal reasoning where I teach participants causal network information and then ask them to solve inference problems in the form of causal probabilistic queries (e.g.: if X causes A and B, what is the probability of A being present knowing that X is but B is not present?). The first experiment focusses on the effect of time pressure on such causal judgements, while the second experiment uses multiple techniques to elicit repeated judgments for participants in order to assess both inter- and intra-participant variability in causal judgments. In the second part of the dissertation, we develop and test a new cognitive model of causal reasoning named the Bayesian Mutation Sampler. The first chapter in this section discusses the rationale behind the Bayesian Mutation Sampler and shows how it is an improvement over the model it is based on (the Mutation Sampler). In the next chapter I employ cognitive modelling to account for the inter- and intra-participant variability in causal judgments. This study confirms that the Bayesian Mutation Sampler outperforms other plausible models. In part 3 I take a radical turn towards philosophy. I identify, and subsequently build upon, a lack of an embodied and situated perspective on causal cognition. In this part I first give an introduction to the Skilled Intentionality Framework, which I then use to put forward an affordance-based theory of causal cognition which I develop using the literature on embodied cognition and ecological psychology.