Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Psychology
How do we understand and learn from other's actions? Integrating social learning and causal inference
From an early age, children are exquisitely
sensitive social beings, and their causal learning takes
place in a rich social context where the goal-directed
actions of others lead to many of the causal outcomes
children observe. A natural question is therefore how
social interaction informs and influences children’s
causal learning, and how causal reasoning influences
children’s social inferences. In this talk, I will look
at how social information, including causal
demonstrations and verbal instruction, can be combined
with other sources of causal evidence, such as direct
observation and the results of our own actions, when
making judgments about the causal nature of the world. I
will first present studies showing that adults are able
to jointly infer causal structure and human action
structure from videos of human behavior. I will then
present work suggesting that children are able to
rationally combine multiple sources of information about
which actions are causally necessary when deciding what
to imitate, interpreting the same statistical evidence
differently when it comes from a knowledgeable teacher
versus a naïve demonstrator. Finally, I will present
research looking at how children and adults combine
direct observation of probabilistic data with causal
predictions provided by a social informant, and how this
influences their future trust in that informant.
Throughout this work, I use computational probabilistic
models to evaluate what learners with differing social
assumptions should rationally infer from the social and
causal evidence they receive.
April 1: Marina Everri
Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy)
Between continuity and change: The analysis of family micro-transitions
during parents and adolescents conversations
April 15: Alison Miller Singley & Zi Lin Sim
Ph.D. Candidates, Department of Psychology
April 29: Alison L. Miller
Assistant Professor, School of Public Health, University of Michigan
May 6: Colette Auerswald
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, UCSF
May 13: Jennifer Arter
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Psychology
All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.