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Typical studies of concept learning in adults address the learning of novel concepts, but much of learning involves the updating and restructuring of familiar concepts. Research on conceptual change explores this issue directly but differs greatly from the formal approach of the adult learning studies. This paper bridges these two areas to advance our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying concept restructuring. The main idea behind this approach is that concepts are built on causal-explanatory knowledge, and hence, models of causal induction may help to clarify the mechanisms of the restructuring process. A new paradigm is presented to study the learning and revising of causal networks. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that learners' prior beliefs about the causal relations in a domain affected their hypotheses as they began to infer the correct causes. First, when the prior learning suggested evidence against …