Causality

Contributor: Liangru Xiang

Reading list

survey/review/perspective paper book Encyclopedia

Required

• Dark, Beyond Deep: A Paradigm Shift to Cognitive AI with Humanlike Common Sense (Section 3), Engineering 2020
• Estimating causal effects of treatments in randomized and nonrandomized studies, Journal of Educational Psychology 1974
• Theory-based Causal Induction, PsychReview 2009
• Theory-based Causal Transfer: Integrating Instance-level Induction and Abstract-level Structure Learning, AAAI 2020

Optional - Causal Learning

• Causal Models
• Predictive and Diagnostic Learning Within Causal Models: Asymmetries in Cue Competition, JEPG 1992
• A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets, PsychReview 2004
• When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: Developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships, Cognition 2004
• Reconstructing Constructivism: Causal Models, Bayesian Learning Mechanisms, and the Theory Theory, Psychological Bulletin 2012
• Where science starts: Spontaneous experiments in preschoolers’ exploratory play, Cognition 2011
• Observing the unexpected enhances infants’ learning and exploration, Science 2015
• Play, Curiosity, and Cognition, Annual Review of Developmental Psychology 2020

Optional - Causal Perception

• Perceptual causality and animacy, TiCS 2001
• Causation From Perception, Perspectives on Psychological Science 2011
• The perception of causality in infancy, Acta Psychologica 2006

Optional - Causal Judgment

• The Causal Asymmetry, PsychReview 2006
• Bayesian Generic Priors for Causal Learning, PsychReview 2008
• A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments for physical events, PsychReview 2021
• 16-Month-Olds Rationally Infer Causes of Failed Actions, Science 2011
• What happened? Reconstructing the past from vision and sound, CogSci 2021

Optional - Perspective

• Causality in Thought, Annual Review of Psychology 2015
• Associative Accounts of Causality Judgment, Psychology of Learning and Motivation 1988
• Beyond Covariation: Cues to Causal Structure, Causal learning: Psychology, philosophy, and computation (2007)
• What is wrong with Bayes net?, The monist (2021)
• Intuitive Theories, Oxford handbook of causal reasoning (2017)
• The Seven Tools of Causal Inference, with Reflections on Machine Learning, Communications of the ACM 2019
• Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Cambridge University Press (2009)

Essay

1. Is causality really different from covariation/association?
2. Why is causal perception special? Is it part of cognition or similar to how we perceive the color?
3. What is the role of time in causality? Literature seems to suggest that causality can help reconstruct the past events, predict the future by counterfactual, and tightly controlled by time duration and direction.
4. How to build a computational model to capture the causal relation and causal structure?