Abstract / Description of output
We explore intervention policies chosen by participants when learning about causal structures in continuous systems. We used the continuous time and state space formalism of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck networks (Davis et al., 2020b). We find that participants' interventions can be understood as compositions of two basic actions: swipes, large movements generating large changes in values in a short time window, and holds, fixing variables for a few frames and observing the outcome. We further show that intervention policies depend on the underlying causal structure that participants are attempting to retrieve. Swipes were performed more often when there was no outgoing link, suggesting that rapid successive movements was useful in validating the absence of causal relations. On the other hand, interventions featuring longer holding times were favoured in cases where there was at least one outgoing link from the intervened node and appeared to serve the purpose of establishing the sign and strength of causal relationships. Overall, these findings indicate that causal inference in continuous contexts appears to be a two step process, where participants use different interventions for causal discovery than they do to qualify the nature of discovered links, hinting at a tendency to decompose inference to simplify it.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
Editors | Micah Goldwater, Florencia Anggoro, Brett Hayes, Desmond Ong |
Publisher | The Cognitive Science Society |
Pages | 2370-2376 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Volume | 45 |
Publication status | Published - 29 Jul 2023 |
Event | 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognition in Context - Sydney, Australia Duration: 26 Jul 2023 → 29 Jul 2023 https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2023/ |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society |
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Publisher | The Cognitive Science Society |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1069-7977 |
Conference
Conference | 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society |
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Abbreviated title | CogSci2023 |
Country/Territory | Australia |
City | Sydney |
Period | 26/07/23 → 29/07/23 |
Internet address |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- active learning
- causal reasoning
- interventions
- continuous time