ENGLISH

Causal Learning: Psychology, Philosophy, and Computation

By Alison Gopnik , Laura Schulz

Book information

Publisher
Oxford University Press, USA
Year
2007
ISBN
0195176804, 9780195176803, 9781435600508
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (2614362 bytes)
Series
Oxford Series in Cognitive Development
Edition
1
Pages
384\371
Topic
Education
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism.

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