Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We explore how adults learn counterintuitive causal relationships, and whether they interpret evidence and discoverhypotheses by incrementally revising beliefs. We examined how adults learned a novel, unusual causal rule when given datathat initially appeared to follow a simpler, more salient rule. Adults watched a video of blocks placed sequentially on a detectorthat activated when a block was a ”blicket”, then were asked to determine the underlying causal structure. We contrasted twocausal learning problems. In both cases, one rule could be used to determine which objects were blickets; in the first problemthis rule was complex, but could be found by making incremental improvements to a simple and salient initial hypothesis. Thesecond problem’s rule was simpler, but to adopt it, participants had to ignore initial beliefs. Our results provide some of thefirst evidence for an inference trade-off analogous to the ”explore-exploit” trade-off in active learning.