Emergent representations of graphical structure in mechanistic neural models of causal judgment

Humans have a remarkable ability to judge causal relationships from a limited number of unreliable observations. Past work on causal cognition has largely focused on normative accounts of human behavior, leaving unknown how biologically plausible neural systems could learn causal relationships from observations and update their representations of causal structure with additional evidence. Here, we leverage task-optimized recurrent neural networks to discover candidate implementation-level neural mechanisms of causal judgment. We propose a novel cognitive task in which a subject observes stochastic samples from an unknown causal structure (e.g. among variables A, B, and C with unknown causal relationships), and must judge whether a specific causal relationship is present given a query (e.g. "true"). We found that, after training, recurrent neural networks perform the task with high accuracy, adopt strategies that incorporate the behavior of non-queried variables to form their judgments, and, despite being trained only on pairwise queries ("true", "true", etc), form implicit beliefs about the complete graphical structure underlying the observations. Lastly, we use dynamical systems analysis to identify a set of low-level neural mechanisms that implement causal judgment and representation of causal graphical structure. Together, these findings lay the groundwork for a "true" approach to causal cognition, providing a potential basis for subsequent experimental study in the brain.