The validation model of causal bridging inferences proposed by Singer and colleagues (e.g., Singer in "Can J Exp Psychol," 47(2):340-359, 1993) claims that before a causal bridging inference is accepted, it must be validated by existing knowledge. For example, to understand "Dorothy took the aspirins. Her pain went away," one…

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in scientific inference, statistics, and machine learning. It is also a central part of human learning, and a task that people perform remarkably well given its notorious difficulties. People can learn causal structure in various settings, from diverse forms of data: observations…

Computational models of analogy have assumed that the strength of an inductive inference about the target is based directly on similarity of the analogs and in particular on shared higher order relations. In contrast, work in philosophy of science suggests that analogical inference is also guided by causal models of the source and target. In 3…

Policy problems like "What should we do about global warming?" are ill-defined in large part because we do not agree on a system to represent them the way we agree Algebra problems should be represented by equations. As a first step toward building a policy deliberation tutor, we investigated: (a) whether causal diagrams help students learn to…