The mental representation of causal conditional reasoning外文电子书籍.pdf

Cognition 119 (2011) 403–418 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.else /locate/COGNIT The mental representation of causal conditional reasoning: Mental models or causal models Nilufa Ali a, Nick Chater b, Mike Oaksford c,⇑ a Department of Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK b Behavioural Sciences Group, Warwick Business School, Warwick University, Coventry, UK c Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: In this paper, two experiments are reported investigating the nature of the cognitive rep- Received 6 May 2010 resentations underlying causal conditional reasoning performance. The predictions of cau- Revised 2 February 2011 sal and logical interpretations of the conditional diverge sharply when inferences involving Accepted 4 February 2011 pairs of conditionals—such as if P1 then Q and if P2 then Q—are considered. From a causal perspective, the causal direction of these conditionals is critical: are the Pi causes of Q; or symptoms caused by Q. The rich variety of inference patterns can naturally be modelled Keywords: by Bayesian networks. A pair of causal conditionals where Q is an effect corresponds to a Causal models ‘‘collider’’ structure where th