Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore how adults learn counterintuitive causal relation-ships, and whether they discover hypotheses by revising theirbeliefs incrementally. We examined how adults learned a noveland unusual causal rule when presented with data that initiallyappeared to conform to a simpler, more salient rule. Adultswatched a video of several blocks placed sequentially on ablicket detector, and were then asked to determine the under-lying causal structure. In the near condition the true rule wascomplex, but could be found by making incremental improve-ments to the simple and salient initial hypothesis. The distantcondition was governed by a simpler rule, but to adopt that ruleparticipants had to set aside their initial beliefs, rather thanrevising them incrementally. Adults performed better in thenear condition, despite this rule being more complex, provid-ing some of the first evidence for an explore-exploit trade-offin inference, analogous to the trade-off in active learning.