Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Omissions figure prominently in causal reasoning fromdiagnosis to ascriptions of negligence. One philosophicalproposal posits that omissions are accompanied by acontrasting alternative that describes a case of orthodox (non-omissive) causation (Schaffer, 2005; Bernstein, 2014). Apsychological hypothesis can be drawn from this contrastview of omissions: by default, humans should interpretomissive causations as representing at least two possibilities,i.e., a possibility representing the omission and a possibilityrepresenting a contrast. The theory of mental models supposesthat reasoners construct only one possibility (the omission) bydefault, and that they consider separate alternativepossibilities in sequential order. Two experiments test thecontrast hypothesis against the model theory, and findevidence in favor of the model-theoretic account.