Empowerment Gain and Causal Model Construction: Children and adults are sensitive to controllability and variability in their causal interventions

arXiv:2512.08230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning. In contrast, cognitive scientists have applied advances in our formal understanding of causation in computer science, particularly within the Causal Bayes Net formalism, to understand human causal learning. I