Learning what matters: Causal abstraction in human inference

Abstract

What shape do people's mental models take? We hypothesize that people build causal models that are suited to the task at hand. These models abstract away information to represent what matters. To test this idea empirically, we presented participants with causal learning paradigms where some features were outcome-relevant and others weren't. In Experiment 1, participants had to learn what objects of different shape and color made a machine turn on. In Experiment 2, they had to predict whether blocks sliding down ramps would cross a finish line. In both experiments, participants made systematic errors in a surprise test that asked them to recall what they had seen earlier. The errors people made suggest that they had built mental models of the task that privileged causally relevant information. Our results contribute to recent efforts trying to characterize the important role that causal abstraction plays in human learning and inference.