Causal Perception
There are some causal events that we perceive directly, rather than inferring. The most well-known version of these events is the 'Launching' display first studied by Albert Michotte a century ago.
One branch of our research looks at what exactly we perceive when we see these events, and what we infer or add on later.
Relevant papers:
Causality and memory
Causality is a big part of why we experience the world as a coherent series of events rather than things that just arbitrarily happen. We are testing the hypothesis that causality give structure to our memories, helping us remember the order in which things occurred and why.
Causal judgment and counterfactual reasoning
One surprising finding from the past ten years is that when we make judgments about whether one thing caused another, or how much one thing caused another, we don't just think about what actually happened. Instead, we think about what could or would have happened if something had been different. There are an infinite number of these counterfactual possibilities that we could consider, but in fact, people tend to only consider a couple of possibilities, and we can predict which ones they will think of: Peopler consider what should normally have happened.
Relevant papers:
The origins of causal cognition
The psychologist William James famously suggested that infants experience the world as a "blooming, buzzing confusion". One critical ability for making sense of the world is understanding cause and effect. How does this ability emerge, and when? We study early understanding of causal events in infants as young as 6 months of age in collaborations with the CEU Cognitive Development Center.
Relevant papers:
The causal structure of knowledge
In the last few centuries, the idea of the 'renaissance man' who is good at everything has essentially gone extinct as the amount of human knowledge has far surpassed what any one mind can handle. How do we learn to navigate a complex web of knowledge in our mind and the minds of others? What do we know about the information we're looking for, before we actually find it? What sources of information can we trust, for which topics? These questions are critical to understanding how we acquire the causal knowledge we use every day.
Relevant papers: