Journal Articles

1. Sobel, DM; Kushnir, T, The importance of decision making in causal learning from interventions., Memory & cognition, vol. 34 no. 2 (March, 2006), pp. 411-419 [doi].
   (last updated on 2026/01/17)

   Abstract:
   Recent research has focused on how interventions benefit causal learning. This research suggests that the main benefit of interventions is in the temporal and conditional probability information that interventions provide a learner. But when one generates interventions, one must also decide what interventions to generate. In three experiments, we investigated the importance of these decision demands to causal learning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that learners were better at learning causal models when they observed intervention data that they had generated, as opposed to observing data generated by another learner. Experiment 2 demonstrated the same effect between self-generated interventions and interventions learners were forced to make. Experiment 3 demonstrated that when learners observed a sequence of interventions such that the decision-making process that generated those interventions was more readily available, learning was less impaired. These data suggest that decision making may be an important part of causal learning from interventions.