A long-standing finding in the causal learning literature is that adults struggle to identify conjunctive causal rules, where an effect requires the simultaneous presence of multiple causes, while performing better in disjunctive settings. However, most demonstrations of this ``conjunctive handicap'' rely on passive observation paradigms with limited evidence, where learners have no control over evidence generation. This paper asks whether this bias persists when adults are granted agency through active exploration. Using a modified ``blicket detector'' task, adult participants freely intervened to identify causal objects under conjunctive or disjunctive rule structures. We show that active exploration substantially improves adults' conjunctive causal reasoning, although conjunctive rules still require more tests to infer than disjunctive rules. We further compare human performance to a range of large language models in the same setting. While some state-of-the-art models approach human-level performance on hypothesis inference accuracy, they often exhibit less efficient exploration strategies and similar conjunctive-disjunctive performance gaps.

翻译：因果学习领域长期存在一个发现：成人在识别合取因果规则（即效应需要多个原因同时存在）时存在困难，而在析取情境下表现更好。然而，这种“合取障碍”的多数演示依赖于证据有限的被动观察范式，学习者无法控制证据生成。本文探究在赋予成人通过主动探索获得能动性时，这种偏差是否依然存在。采用改良的“blicket探测器”任务，成人参与者通过自由介入来识别合取或析取规则结构下的因果对象。我们表明，主动探索显著提升了成人的合取因果推理能力，尽管合取规则仍需比析取规则更多的测试才能推导出来。我们进一步将人类表现与同一设定下的多种大语言模型进行比较。虽然部分最先进的模型在假设推理准确性上接近人类水平，但它们通常表现出较低的探索效率，并显示出类似的合取-析取性能差距。