Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Past research indicates that humans can infer hidden causesfrom covariational evidence, and readily use temporal informa-tion to infer relationships among events. Here we explore a set-ting in which people can attribute events to a common hiddencause or causal relationships among observed events, includingcausal cycles, purely on the basis of timing information. Wepresent data from three behavioral experiments and extend pre-viously proposed Bayesian models that makes use of order anddelay information for causal structure learning. Our findingssupport the idea that people rely on the delays between eventsrather than order information alone. Meanwhile, deviationsfrom our model predictions suggest that people have an induc-tive bias against common hidden causes and rely on heuristicsto distinguish between causal structures, such as event over-laps, at least with the cover story considered in these experi-ments. Further, our data suggest that people have particularlyflexible representations of cyclic relationships.