ABSTRACT
The major objective of this chapter is to investigate within the mental model framework a central domain of everyday reasoning: physical causality. We shall provide both an account of folk psychological knowledge of causation in the physical world, and a computer simulation of causal reasoning in naive subjects. We consider our work as a development of the seminal analysis of causation initially offered by Johnson-Laird (1983). Thus, our goal is to explore people’s competence in understanding causal relations between events and objects.
