Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Event timing and interventions are important and intertwinedcues to causal structure, yet they have typically been studiedseparately. We bring them together for the first time in an ex-periment where participants learn causal structure by perform-ing interventions in continuous time. We contrast learning inacyclic and cyclic devices, with reliable and unreliable cause–effect delays. We show that successful learners use interven-tions to structure and simplify their interactions with the de-vices and that we can capture judgment patterns with heuristicsbased on online construction and testing of a single structural