Rationales in children’s causal learning from others’ actions

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.08.003

Cognitive Development

Volume 24, Issue 1, January–March 2009, Pages 70-79

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.08.003 Get rights and content

Abstract

Shown commensurate actions and information by an adult, preschoolers’ causal learning was influenced by the pedagogical context in which these actions occurred. Four-year-olds who were provided with a reason for an experimenter’s action relevant to learning causal structure showed more accurate causal learning than children exposed to the same action and data accompanied by an inappropriate rationale or accompanied by no explanatory information. These results suggest that children’s accurate causal learning is influenced by contextual factors that specify the instructional value of 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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Short reportRationales in children’s causal learning from others’ actions

Abstract

Section snippets

Participants and design

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Cognition

Cognitive Development

Cognition

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Cognition

Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science

Cognition

The acquisition of physical knowledge in infancy: A summary in eight lessons

Role of attention and perceptual grouping in visual statistical learning

Psychological Science

The development of causal reasoning

Understanding “prior intentions” enables two-year-olds to imitatively learn a complex task

Child Development

The role of salience in the extraction of algebraic rules

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Statistical learning of new visual feature combinations by infants

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of The United States of America

On pedagogy

Developmental Science

Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: Two, three, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and co-variation

Developmental Psychology

Young children’s understanding of the mind body distinction

Child Development

Short report
Rationales in children’s causal learning from others’ actions