Edge replacement and minimality as models of causal inference in children

Recently, much research has focused on causal graphical models (CGMs) as a computational-level description of how children represent cause and effect. While this research program has shown promise, there are aspects of causal reasoning that CGMs have difficulty accommodating. We propose a new formalism that amends CGMs. This edge replacement grammar formalizes one existing and one novel theoretical commitment. The existing idea is that children are determinists, in the sense that they believe that apparent randomness comes from hidden complexity, rather than inherent nondeterminism in the world. The new idea is that children think of causation as a branching process: causal relations grow not directly from the cause, but from existing relations between the cause and other effects. We have shown elsewhere that these two commitments together, when formalized, can explain and quantitatively fit the otherwise puzzling effect of nonindependence observed in the adult causal reasoning literature. We then test the qualitative predictions of this new formalism on children in a series of three experiments.