Short reportRationales in children’s causal learning from others’ actions
Section snippets
Participants and design
Sixty 4-year-olds (25 girls, M = 54.08 months, S.D. = 3.46) were recruited from flyers posted in local preschools and lists of hospital births. Seven additional children were tested, but excluded from the study: six because of experimental error and one refused to participate. All children were fluent English speakers. The ethnic distribution of the sample was as follows: 48 children were Caucasian, 9 children were Hispanic, 1 child was Asian, 1 child was of Middle-Eastern descent, and 1 child was
Results
Overall, children required corrective feedback on an average of 0.32 of six questions during the familiarization phase (about 5% of the time), and accuracy did not differ across the three conditions. This suggested that they understood the nature of the task and how the lightbox and cover operated. Children were assigned a score of 1 if they chose the appropriate set of pictures for each causal structure, and a score of 0 otherwise. Preliminary analyses suggested that gender, model order, and
Discussion
Although children observed the experimenter perform the same actions with the same conditional probability information, their ability to recover a causal structure varied as a function of the experimenter’s rationale for generating the action that produced the information. Not all observations of action equally afforded accurate causal learning. Specifically, children appeared sensitive to the positive instructional value of the experimenter’s appropriate rationale. Only in this condition was
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by NSF (DLS-0518161). We would like to thank all of the parents and children who participated in this research. We would also like to thank Esra Aksu, Emily Blumenthal, Sheridan Brett, Claire Cook, Emily Hopkins, Cesalie Stepney, and Kristen Sylvester who helped with data collection and coding, and Philip Parker who helped with stimulus design.
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