Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?
A long-standing finding in the causal learning literature is that adults struggle to identify conjunctive causal rules, where an effect requires the simultaneous presence of multiple causes, while performing better in disjunctive settings. However, most demonstrations of this ``conjunctive handicap'' rely on passive observation paradigms with limited evidence, where learners have no control over evidence generation. This paper asks whether this bias persists when adults are granted agency through active exploration. Using a modified ``blicket detector'' task, adult participants freely intervened to identify causal objects under conjunctive or disjunctive rule structures. We show that acti...
| Authors | Mandana Samiei, Eunice Yiu, Anthony GX-Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 June 2026 |
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