Causality & Time

Causality

The search for a causal understanding of the world is at the heart of human cognition. It shapes learning throughout development and guides intelligent behaviour by allowing cognisers to predict outcomes, selectively gather information, attribute blame and credit, and imagine hypothetical and counterfactual situations. Causal reasoning is also central to the scientific method, underpinning how we, as scientists, design experiments, build and evaluate theories including the ones we use to describe and understand our own minds.

In this session, we will think about how to model the cognition involved in learning, representing and exploiting a causal model of the world.

Primary Readings

Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss.

• Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D. M., Schulz, L. E., Kushnir, T., & Danks, D. (2004). A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological review, 111(1), 3.

Time

“For all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction and time is its only measure.” (Stoppard, 1966)

Unlike most computational systems, humans experience and must respond to their environment through time. One of the most basic forms of human and animal learning is to associate things that happen close together. Everyday activities like speech, music, dance demand precise time control, while imagination, mental simulation, and memory (“mental time travel”) seem to require encoding of (and ability to regenerate events) in the right temporal sequence. What then is the role of time in the various cognitive processes and representations we have been discussing throughout this course?

Primary Readings

Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss.

• Elman, J. L. (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive science, 14(2), 179-211.