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Related Experiment Videos

When is a cause the "same"? Coherent generalization across contexts.

Mimi Liljeholm1, Patricia W Cheng

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA. mlil@ucla.edu

Psychological Science
|October 26, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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People generalize causal power, not just simple cause-effect, across different situations. This finding clarifies how humans learn and apply causality in psychology.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Causal Learning Theory

Background:

  • Competing theories in psychological causality suggest different generalization patterns.
  • Understanding how causality is generalized is key to cognitive learning models.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test predictions from competing psychological approaches to causal learning.
  • To determine which aspect of perceived causality is generalized across contexts.

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted to evaluate causal generalization.
  • Tasks involved judgments of simple causal relations and interactions with background causes.

Main Results:

  • Results demonstrated that causal power is the generalized mental construct.
  • This contrasts with simpler notions of causality that might be expected.

Related Experiment Videos

Conclusions:

  • Causal power, as defined by Cartwright and Cheng, is the transferable element in causal learning.
  • This finding supports a specific model of how humans understand and transfer causal knowledge.