Webcast
Introduction
Causal Reasoning and Decision Making: Imagination and Choice as Interventions with Steven Sloman, Brown University. 7 Apr 1-2pm US Eastern (-0500 GMT)
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The Cognitive Science Society is hosting a free 2005-2006 virtual colloquium series presented live over the Internet.
Topic: Causal Reasoning and Decision Making: Imagination and Choice as Interventions
Speaker: Steven Sloman, Brown University,
Time: April 7, 2006, Friday, 1:00-2:00 p.m. ET
Session Description:
A framework for reasoning about causality has been developed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993) and is reviewed in Pearl (2000). The fundamental idea is that people represent the world by decomposing it into autonomous causal mechanisms that support interventions. On this view, human reasoning is understood as a tool to support human action. I report studies showing that people are highly sensitive to the logic of intervention when reasoning counterfactually, a logic that cannot be reduced to a set of possibilities without a prior causal analysis. The application of the ideas to decision making reveals that good decisions depend on causal analysis and that preferential choice is a form of intervention. I report further studies revealing some of the conditions under which people’s choices display this form of rationality.
Session Presenter:
Steven Sloman is Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1990 and his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1986. He is a computationally-oriented cognitive psychologist who studies topics ranging from categorization and language use to decision-making, inductive inference, and reasoning. Steve’s recent book, Causal Models: How We Think ÂÜÀòÉç¹ÙÍøt the World and Its Alternatives, was published by Oxford University Press in 2005.
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This seminar is sponsored by Elluminate.
Contact Lisa Neal at lisa@acm.org with questions about the seminar.
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