Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The standard approach guiding research on the relationship between categories and causality views categories as reflecting causal relations in the world. We provide evidence that the opposite direction also holds: Categories that have been acquired in previous leaming contexts may influence subsequent causal leaming. In three experiments we show that identical causal leaming experiences yield different attributions of causal capacity depending on the pre-existing categories that the leaming exemplars are assigned to. There is a strong tendency to continue to use old conceptual schemes rather than switch to new ones even when the old categories are not optimal for predicting the new effect. This tendency is particularly strong when there is a plausible semantic link between the categories and the new causal hypothesis under investigation.