Causal Reasoning Survey System
| STG lead(s): |
Elli Mylonas, Carole Mah |
This program provides cognitive science researchers with the ability to create, manage, and administrate questionnaires (experiments) via a web interface. Questions are in the form of an initial paragraph and/or example (scenario) followed by one or more multiple-choice questions. Experiments are organized in sets (of conditions), and it is possible to add constraints to the sets, so that the same subject cannot answer more than one condition from a set, or so that a single subject is required to answer all members of a set (all conditions in a set). The questionnaires are available to be taken on the web, anonymously. Some simple checks are provided to identify and eliminate malicious answers. The questionnaires and user data are stored in a database on the Unix server, and are downloadable for analysis in Excel or another statistical package.
Professor Sloman of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences studies how people reason about cause. http://www.cog.brown.edu/People/sloman/: "Causation is special because all knowledge may be structured around our understanding of causal mechanism. Yet, causal relations cannot directly be observed and seem to require an assessment of counterfactuals, events that have not actually occurred (simplifying, if A causes B, then B wouldn't have occurred if A hadn't, even if A did occur). Ongoing research examines the viability of formal, probabilistic models of causal and counterfactual inference and induction. One focus concerns people's sensitivity to the distinction between observation and action. Through action, people can run mini-experiments that might afford causal inference."
| Principal Investigator(s) or Parent Project Lead(s): |
Steven Sloman
Brown University Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
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| STG involvement initiated: |
July 2001 |
| Status: | hosting |
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Funding support: |
STG Faculty Grant |
Record last modified: 13-Sep-2005
