Infants and Mobiles: Developing an Understanding of Cause and Effect

This repository contains the official code and simulation models for the research paper "Infants and Mobiles: Developing an Understanding of Cause and Effect" accepted at Developmental Science.

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Prerequisites

To run this simulation, you will need the following installed on your system:

• Python 3.8 or higher
• Git (for cloning the repository)

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Environment Setup

We recommend using a virtual environment to manage dependencies and avoid conflicts. Follow these steps to set up your local environment:

1. Clone the repository

2. Create a virtual environment:

# On macOS/Linux
python3 -m venv cais

# On Windows
python -m venv cais

3. Activate the virtual environment:

# On macOS/Linux
source cais/bin/activate

# On Windows
cais\Scripts\activate

4. Install the required dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the Simulation

The main algorithm is contained within simulation.py. Once your environment is set up and activated, you can execute the simulation using the command line.

Basic Run:

python simulation.py

Simulation Parameters

You can customize the simulation behavior by passing various command-line arguments. The script supports different modeling approaches, environmental modes, and tuning parameters.

• Methods (--method): Choose the core learning method.
  • "cais"
  • "controllability"
• Modes (--mode): Define the environmental interaction mode.
  • "normal"
  • "inverted"
  • "bimodal"
• Hyper-parameters to explore:
  • --lr: Learning rate
  • --n_taus: Number of quantiles
  • --surprise_weight: Weight of the surprise term
  • --smoothing: Exponential average smoothing factor

Note: Refer to the paper for explanations of these hyper-parameters.

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Citation

If you use this code or our findings in your research, please cite our paper:

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