1
A fundamental way to reason about causation is in terms of direct contact, like billiard balls colliding. Although collision-like causes have played an important role in philosophical and psychological theories of causation, humans conceptualize many …
The words we use to describe what happened shape what comes to a listener's mind. How do speakers choose what causal expressions to use? How does that choice impact what listeners imagine? In this paper, we develop a computational model of how people …
People use various strategies to bolster the perception of their competence. One strategy is self-handicapping, by which people deliberately impede their performance in order to protect or enhance perceived competence. Despite much prior research, it …
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have produced systems capable of increasingly sophisticated performance on cognitive tasks. However, AI systems still struggle in critical ways: unpredictable and novel environments (robustness), lack …
Understanding emotions is fundamental to human interaction and experience. Humans easily infer emotions from situations or facial expressions, situations from emotions, and do a variety of other affective cognition. How adept is modern AI at these …
When faced with a novel scenario, it can be hard to succeed on the first attempt. In these challenging situations, it is important to know how to retry quickly and meaningfully. Retrying behavior can emerge naturally in robots trained on diverse …
Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future …
When many things contribute to an outcome, people consistently judge certain ones to be the outcome's ''actual'' cause. For instance, people believe the lit match, not the surrounding oxygen, was the cause of the fire. Why? Here, we offer a …
We introduce a novel experimental paradigm for studying multi-modal integration in causal inference. Our experiments feature a physically realistic Plinko machine in which a ball is dropped through one of three holes and comes to rest at the bottom …