Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When learning the relation between a cause and effect, howdo people control for all the other factors that influence thesame effect? Two experiments tested a hypothesis that peoplefocus on events in which the target cause changes and allother factors remain stable. In both four-cause (Experiment 1)and eight-cause (Experiment 2) scenarios, participants learnedcausal relations more accurately when they viewed datasets inwhich only one cause changed at a time. However,participants in the comparison condition, in which multiplecauses changed simultaneously, performed fairly well; inaddition to focusing on events when a single cause changed,they also used events in which multiple causes changed forupdating their beliefs about causal strength. These findingshelp explain how people are able to learn causal relations insituations when there are many alternative factors.