Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Much research on elemental causal learning has focused on how causal strength is learned from the states of variables. In longitudinal contexts, the way a cause and effect change over time can be informative of the underlying causal relationship. We propose a framework for inferring the causal strength from different observed transitions, and compare the predictions to existing models of causal induction. Subjects observe a cause and effect over time, updating their judgments of causal strength after observing different transitions. The results show that some transitions have an effect on causal strength judgments over and above states.