ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with research on the launching effect because of its relevance to the origins of causal understanding in infancy and discusses the few attempts to model adult causal understanding at a fundamental and general level. The essential perceptual structure of the causal impression corresponds to the transition stage. A. Michotte argued that ampliation has the specific function of accounting for the impression of productivity in the causal relation. H. J. Einhorn and R. M. Hogarth proposed that causal judgement could be treated as a kind of judgement under uncertainty. The aim is to use the notion of causal judgement as judgement under uncertainty as a way of integrating diverse and fragmented strands of the literature under a common framework. J. Anderson has treated causal inference under a general approach to human cognition as adaptive. The theory provides a general framework for inference, and causal attribution is treated as a special case.
