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Despite growing scientific interest in the placebo effect and increasing understanding of neurobiological mechanisms, theoretical modeling of the placebo response remains poorly developed. The most extensively accepted theories are…
Animals learn to predict external contingencies from experience through a process of conditioning. A natural mechanism for conditioning is stimulus substitution, whereby the neuronal response to a stimulus with no prior behavioral…
Planned experiments are the gold standard in reliably comparing the causal effect of switching from a baseline policy to a new policy. One critical shortcoming of classical experimental methods, however, is that they typically do not take…
Acquiring fear responses to predictors of aversive outcomes is crucial for survival. At the same time, it is important to be able to modify such associations when they are maladaptive, for instance in treating anxiety and trauma-related…
The present work proposes an alternative approach to the problem of the emergence of classicality. Typical approaches developed in the literature derive the classical behaviour of a quantum system from conditions that concern the value of…
Assessing the systemic effects of uncertainty that arises from agents' partial observation of the true states of the world is critical for understanding a wide range of scenarios. Yet, previous modeling work on agent learning and…
Animals exhibit an innate ability to learn regularities of the world through interaction. By performing experiments in their environment, they are able to discern the causal factors of variation and infer how they affect the world's…
Many research questions concern treatment effects on outcomes that can recur several times in the same individual. For example, medical researchers are interested in treatment effects on hospitalizations in heart failure patients and sports…
Causal mediation analysis provides techniques for defining and estimating effects that may be endowed with mechanistic interpretations. With many scientific investigations seeking to address mechanistic questions, causal direct and indirect…
Some studies of unconscious cognition rely on judgments of participants stating that they have "not seen" the critical stimulus (e.g., in a masked-priming experiment). Trials in which participants gave "not-seen" judgments are then treated…
Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the pillars of science; nevertheless, they rely on hand-crafted hypotheses and expensive analysis. Such constraints prevent causal effect estimation at scale, potentially anchoring on popular yet…
Traditional methods for determining critical parameters are often influenced by human factors. This research introduces a physics-inspired adaptive reinforcement learning framework that enables agents to autonomously interact with physical…
Machine Learning explainability techniques have been proposed as a means of `explaining' or interrogating a model in order to understand why a particular decision or prediction has been made. Such an ability is especially important at a…
Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…
Automated decision systems (ADS) are broadly deployed to inform and support human decision-making across a wide range of consequential settings. However, various context-specific details complicate the goal of establishing meaningful…
Globally-constrained classical fields provide a unexplored framework for modeling quantum phenomena, including apparent particle-like behavior. By allowing controllable constraints on unknown past fields, these models are retrocausal but…
A hallmark of life on Earth is the ability of agents to exert causal power and be drivers of subsequent events. This is key to cognition at all scales. Causal emergence, measuring the degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power…
We present three new diagnostic prediction problems inspired by classical-conditioning experiments to facilitate research in online prediction learning. Experiments in classical conditioning show that animals such as rabbits, pigeons, and…
Environmentally-induced superselection or "einselection" has been proposed as an observer-independent mechanism by which apparently classical systems "emerge" from physical interactions between degrees of freedom described completely…
This study explores the emergence of counter-inferential behavior in natural and artificial cognitive systems, that is, patterns in which agents misattribute empirical success or suppress adaptation, leading to epistemic rigidity or…