A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments for physical events

This repository contains all materials for the paper "A counterfactual simulation model of causal judgments for physical events" by Tobias Gerstenberg, Noah Goodman, David Lagnado & Joshua Tenenbaum. If you have any questions about this repository, please feel to email me at gerstenberg@stanford.edu.

Repository structure

.
├── code
│   ├── R
│   │   ├── cache
│   │   └── data
│   ├── flash
│   │   ├── experiment1
│   │   ├── experiment2
│   │   └── preliminary_study
│   └── python
│       ├── figures
│       ├── results
│       ├── trialinfo
│       └── video
├── data
├── docs
├── figures
│   ├── clips
│   │   ├── experiment1
│   │   ├── experiment2
│   │   └── preliminary_study
│   ├── diagrams
│   └── plots
└── videos
    ├── experiment1
    ├── experiment2
    └── preliminary_study

code

R

Analysis and plotting script. You can view a rendered html file of the analysis here.

flash

Flash experiment code files.

python

The counterfactual simulation model is implemented in python 3.7 using the physics engine pymunk. The model.py file contains the model code.

to run the counterfactual simulation model, cd into code/python/
you can then run python simulation_2ball.py 1 where the last number indicates the degree of noise that should be applied in the counterfactual simulation
simulation_teleport.py and simulation_3ball.py are used for generating model predictions for the Experiments 2 and 3 in the paper
in each simulation file, you can set the following parameters:
- n_simulations: number of counterfactual simulations to run
- trials: which trials to run (specified as a list)
- noise: noise applied to the ball's motion in the counterfactual situation
- record_data: logical value whether or not to record the outcome of the simulations
- experiment: experiment indicator
- animate: logical value whether or not to show animations of the simulations
to create videos of the different clips, you can run the make_videos.sh script like so bash make_videos.sh '2balls' 0 (this would make a video of the first clip in Experiment 1)

data

Raw data files of the three experiments reported in the paper (two conditions each).

figures

clips

Illustrations of the different clips in each experiment.

diagrams

Diagrams used in the paper.

plots

Results plots.

videos

Videos of the clips presented in the three different experiments.

cicl-stanford/csm