@inproceedings{f26d8bbb042c4797b64db09caa01e231,
title = "Generic Priors Yield Competition Between Independently-Occurring Causes",
abstract = "Recent work on causal learning has investigated the possible role of generic priors in guiding human judgments of causal strength. One proposal has been that people have a preference for causes that are sparse and strong-i.e., few in number and individually strong (Lu et al., 2008). Evidence for the use of sparse-and-strong priors has been obtained using a maximally simple causal set-up (a single candidate cause plus unobserved background causes). Here we examine the possible impact of generic priors in more complex, multicausal set-ups. Sparse-and-strong priors predict that competition can be observed between candidate causes even if they occur independently (i.e., the estimated strength of cause A will be lower if the strength of uncorrelated cause B is high rather than low). Experiment 1 revealed such a cue competition effect in judgments of causal strength. Experiment 2 showed that, as predicted by a Bayesian learning model with sparse-and-strong priors, the impact of the prior diminishes as sample size increases. These findings support the importance of a preference for parsimony as a constraint on causal learning.",
keywords = "Bayesian modeling, causal learning, causal strength, generic priors, parsimony",
author = "Derek Powell and Merrick, {M. Alice} and Hongjing Lu and Holyoak, {Keith J.}",
note = "Funding Information: Preparation of this paper was supported by grant N000140810186 from the Office of Naval Research. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} CogSci 2013.All rights reserved.; 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics, CogSci 2013 ; Conference date: 31-07-2013 Through 03-08-2013",
year = "2013",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013",
publisher = "The Cognitive Science Society",
pages = "1157--1162",
editor = "Markus Knauff and Natalie Sebanz and Michael Pauen and Ipke Wachsmuth",
booktitle = "Cooperative Minds",
}