Does the structure of causal models predict information search

This paper investigates whether the structure of people’s knowledge of causal relations between the features of categories predicts how they search for information in a categorization task. Participants were asked to draw a causal model that described how the symptoms of depression are causally related to one another, and to estimate the strengths of those relationships. Additionally, they were asked to categorize a series of patients as suffering from depression or not, after searching their symptoms. The results showed that the structurally more important a symptom was in a causal model, the more frequently and the earlier in search it was inspected. Also, a measure of feature importance that ignored causal strengths accounted for search behavior at least as well as the weighted version of the same measure.

[1]  W. Ahn,et al.  Causal Status as a Determinant of Feature Centrality , 2000, Cognitive Psychology.

[2]  D. Weiss,et al.  Costs and Payoffs in Perceptual Research , 2008 .

[3]  Nancy S. Kim,et al.  ConceptBuilder: An open-source software tool for measuring, depicting, and quantifying causal models , 2009, Behavior research methods.

[4]  R. Dawes.  Judgment under uncertainty: The robust beauty of improper linear models in decision making , 1979 .

[5]  B. Newell,et al.  Search strategies in decision making: the success of “success” , 2004 .

[6]  Steven A. Sloman,et al.  Feature Centrality and Conceptual Coherence , 1998, Cogn. Sci..

[7]  Henning Saß,et al.  Diagnostisches und statistisches Manual psychischer Störungen , 2004 .

[8]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  Structure and strength in causal induction , 2005, Cognitive Psychology.

[9]  P. Lovie,et al.  The flat maximum effect and linear scoring models for prediction , 1986 .

[10]  Nancy S. Kim,et al.  Causal Cycles in Categorization , 2006 .

[11]  Jacob Cohen.  Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences , 1969, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Research Design.

[12]  P. Todd,et al.  Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart , 1999 .

[13]  Jan K. Woike,et al.  Journal of Mathematical Psychology Categorization with Limited Resources: a Family of Simple Heuristics , 2022 .

[14]  B. Rehder.  A causal-model theory of conceptual representation and categorization. , 2003, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[15]  R. Hastie,et al.  Causal knowledge and categories: the effects of causal beliefs on categorization, induction, and similarity. , 2001, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[16]  Sergey Brin,et al.  The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine , 1998, Comput. Networks.

[17]  Nancy S Kim,et al.  The influence of naive causal theories on lay concepts of mental illness. , 2002, The American journal of psychology.

[18]  Julian N. Marewski,et al.  Fast and Frugal Heuristics Are Plausible Models of Cognition: Reply To , 2022 .