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This chapter presents a kind of typology of different sorts of abilities that might be associated with the notion of causal understanding, the acquisition of causal beliefs, causally informed action patterns, and so on. It asks how these various abilities relate to one another, whether some may play a role in the acquisition of others, and so on. Drawing on relevant philosophical literature, it shows that different philosophical accounts of causation track, at least to some degree, different and dissociable competences that go together to make up adult causal understanding. The chapter is organized as follows. It begins with a sketch of competing philosophical accounts of causation, emphasizing the difference between claims about causal relationships as these exist in the world and claims about the way in which we and other animals represent causal relationships. It then explores the contrast between two different families of approaches to (or ways of thinking about) causation, one of which is called ‘difference-making’ and the other ‘geometrical-mechanical’. The remainder of the chapter discusses elements that seem relevant to whether there is adult human-like causal cognition.

This chapter begins with a discussion on the study of tool use in order to understand causal cognition. It argues that tool use studies reveal the most basic type or causal understanding being put to use, in a way that studies that focus on learning statistical relationships between cause and effect or studies of perceptual causation do not. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

Traditional psychological approaches to causality assume that we acquire causal information by extracting it from our experience of events. One possibility is that we can directly perceive causality (or can use a specialized perceptual module) to detect causal interactions. Another possibility is that we infer causality from correlational evidence—the co-occurrence of particular causes and effects. This chapter argues that these purely bottom-up solutions are unlikely to succeed. It considers a new approach to causal cognition that may alleviate these difficulties which comes from research on Bayes nets in computer science.

This chapter examines instrumental action as a basic behavioural marker of causal cognition by investigating the concordance between human causal judgements and instrumental performance across variations in the parameters of an action–outcome relation. It is also concerned with whether or not animal action exhibits the necessary prerequisite for an intentional account, namely that it is mediated by some representation of the action-outcome association. Finally, it analyses whether human causal judgements and animal actions are mediated by comparable processes in terms of their susceptibility to causal illusions.

This chapter explores some of the interactions between normative and theoretical work on causation and causal reasoning (both in philosophy and in disciplines such as statistics and machine learning), and descriptive work from experimental psychology on causal cognition. It argues that research in each of these areas can fruitfully inform the other. It describes some ideas about causal reasoning that have emerged from this research, focusing on “interventionist” ideas; it also attempts to extract some general morals about the kinds of interactions between the empirical and the traditionally philosophical that have been fruitful. Comparisons with research strategies in experimental philosophy are also explored.

The human mind contains several faculties of thinking used for different fields of study. For instance, there are psychological processes designed for aesthetics, which are different from those assigned to religion, scientific inquiries, and ethical questions. However, recent experiments reveal that people's intuition regarding folk psychology and causal cognition can be influenced by moral judgments, instead of the sciences. This chapter seeks to understand how these results came to light. It begins with a discussion of the person-as-scientist theory in contrast with the person-as-moralist theory, followed by a series of analyses on mental states, motivational bias, types of moral judgment, and competence theories.

Apart from their economic implications, snares and traps embody far-reaching implications for the cognition of people using them, as discussed in this chapter. They rely on unseen action, obliging the hunter to imagine the remote-capture scenario. Furthermore, the hunter must strategize before the deed and then be content with delayed gratification. Only minds like our own can plan unseen action that involves delayed gratification. Consequently, when snares and traps first appeared, we have clear evidence of people who behaved and thought like us. The archaeologist’s dilemma is that the remains of snares and traps are elusive. Circumstantial evidence must therefore be sought—for example, the presence of species that may have been caught accidentally in snares. At Sibudu, in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, mongoose remains seem to provide such evidence.