Drescher's computational theory of causal learning
"An agent learns by discovering reliable patterns: when I do X in context C, result R tends to follow."
Gary Drescher's Made-Up Minds (1991) provides a computational theory of how minds learn causal models of the world. Drescher was a student of Marvin Minsky at MIT, and his schema mechanism extends Piaget's developmental psychology into executable algorithms.
A schema is a causal unit:
Context → Action → Result
The agent doesn't start with schemas. It discovers them through experience, noticing which actions reliably produce which results in which contexts.