Ethan Herenstein and Renata Chai (M.S. Candidates)

Public Presentations of M.S. Projects

Abstracts:

Ethan Herenstein (M.S. Candidate)
Symbolic Systems Program, "The Effect of Jury Instructions on Juror Causal Reasoning" (Advisor: Thomas Icard, Philosophy Department)

The law often requires jurors to use circumstantial evidence to resolve questions of causation. Because jurors are untrained in the law, the judge provides the jury with instructions at the end of the trial explaining the law applicable to the case and directing the jurors to find the facts in accordance with certain legal definitions and instructions. When causation is at issue, the judge will define “causation” for the jury before the jury goes off to resolve the question. But judges and scholars have long disagreed over how to define causation in the law. Some advocate for the “but-for” test, which requires jurors to determine whether “but-for” the defendant’s actions, the plaintiff would have suffered the harm. Others advocate for the “substantial factor” test, which requires jurors to determine whether the defendant’s actions were a substantial factor in bringing about the plaintiff’s harm. Finally, at least one state has abandoned jury instructions on causation entirely, allowing jurors to rely on whatever causal intuitions they might have.

This paper studies the effect of jury instructions on jurors’ causal reasoning. Relying on two original survey experiments, the paper finds that the debate between supporters of the “but-for” and the “substantial factor” test is largely illusory: there was no statistically significant difference between the causal ratings of the participants given “but-for” instructions and those given “substantial factor” instructions. The paper concludes with a discussion of three implications that this finding has on the law.

Renata Chai (M.S. Candidate)
Symbolic Systems Program, "From Scribbles to Shapes: Measuring Developmental Changes in Visuomotor Ability for Drawing" (Advisor: Michael C. Frank, Psychology Department)

How do infants who can barely control their limbs grow into children who can produce richly meaningful drawings that express what they are learning about the world? One plausible contributor to this developmental change might be enhanced visuomotor control with age. In order to evaluate developmental change of children’s visuomotor ability, we designed a set of tablet-based tasks to trace and copy primitive geometric shapes and recruited 4083 children, whose age ranges from 2 to 10, to complete these tasks. To analyze this large dataset, we then developed an automatic procedure to quantify children’s performance and collected adults ratings on a subset of the data to validate the model’s performance.