Children's Reasoning About the Causal Significance of the Temporal Order of Events.

Abstract

Four experiments examined children's ability to reason about the causal significance of the order in which 2 events occurred (the pressing of buttons on a mechanically operated box). In Study 1, 4-year-olds were unable to make the relevant inferences, whereas 5-year-olds were successful on one version of the task. In Study 2, 3-year-olds were successful on a simplified version of the task in which they were able to observe the events although not their consequences. Study 3 found that older children had difficulties with the original task even when provided with cues to attend to order information. However, 5-year-olds performed successfully in Study 4, in which the causally relevant event was made more salient.Much of the recent research on the development of causal reasoning has emphasized young children's competence with various aspects of causal reasoning (e.g., Corrigan & Denton, 1996;Gopnik, Sobel, Schulz, & Glymour, 2001;Schlottmann, Allen, Linderoth, & Hesketh, 2002). It has been well established that even in infancy children show some type of sensitivity to the causal relationships between events (Leslie, 1982;Oakes, 1994;Oakes & Cohen, 1990) and that children in the preschool years show an appreciation of the causal powers of familiar objects (Bullock, Gelman, & Baillargeon, 1982;Gelman, Bullock, & Meck, 1980) and seem to infer the causal powers of novel objects in principled ways (Shultz, 1982;Shultz & Kestenbaum, 1985). Indeed, the idea that relatively sophisticated causal reasoning abilities are intact early in development has played an important role in the influential "theory-theory" approach to conceptual development.This emphasis on the competence of preschoolers' causal reasoning can be contrasted with a claim by Povinelli, Landry, Theall, Clark, and Castille (1999) that 3-year-olds have difficulty with a fundamental causal ability, a causal ability that Povinelli et al. have linked closely with the development of a concept of time. Specifically, they have argued that children of this age may not grasp that events that occurred in the more recent past may be more relevant to determining the current state of the world than events that took place at an earlier point in time. To use a common example, imagine that you have lost your car keys and are trying to find them. You may mentally retrace the day's events in an attempt to remember what you were doing when you last had the car keys, because you know that this most recent event is the most causally relevant to the current location of the keys. Povinelli et al.'s claim is that 3-year-olds do not have this kind of understanding of the causal relevance of the relative recency of events.They examined this ability in 3-and 5-year-olds (Povinelli et al., 1999, Study 5) using a delayed video feedback technique. Along with an experimenter, children took part in two different games, one after another, in a room in which there were two different colored boxes attached to the wall behind the location where the child was seated. During Game 1, and unbeknow...

Young children’s reasoning about the order of past events

“…As a result, failure to consider the order of occurrence of events in a sequence when reasoning about the causal consequences of those events can lead to errors. Indeed, Povinelli et al's (1999) and McCormack and Hoerl (2005) findings can be interpreted as evidence that young children are prone to such errors.…”

“…The issue addressed in the current study is whether the paradigms used by Povinelli et al (1999) and McCormack and Hoerl (2005) have led to an underestimation of young children's abilities. Importantly, Povinelli et al's task required children to understand something about the representational medium of videotape-in particular that video clips of events that are novel to them in fact depict real events that occurred in the recent past, and that the order in which two events are presented on video is not necessarily determined by the order in which those events actually happened.…”

“…However, it leaves open the extent to which they can incorporate information about temporal order into further reasoning. It has recently been suggested that it is not until around 5 years that children can fully understand and thus fully make use of information about the temporal order in which events have occurred (McCormack & Hoerl, 2005;Povinelli, Landry, Theall, Clark, & Castille, 1999). Specifically, Povinelli et al (1999) have suggested that although young children may indeed possess temporally ordered representations of the world, their reasoning is constrained because they do not fully grasp the underpinnings of and the significance of such chronological organization.…”

“…Retrieving these pieces of information and then combining them may have proved beyond the working memory capabilities of young children. Indeed, McCormack and Hoerl (2005) distinguished between two quite different explanations of 4-year-olds' failure: that children of this age genuinely do not seem to grasp the significance of temporal order information, or that the processing demands of the task (in particular, the working-memory demands) are beyond their capabilities. They admitted that their findings alone did not allow them to decide between these two possibilities.…”

“…Four-year-olds consistently failed this task, whereas 5-year-olds passed, at least when cued to attend to the order information. McCormack and Hoerl (2005) described their task as assessing temporal-causal reasoning, which they defined as reasoning in which ''the causal implications of the temporal order of two or more events must be considered in one's reasoning'' (p. 55). In both their task and that of Povinelli et al, inferences about the current state of the world will only be correct if the order in which the two relevant events have occurred is considered; thus both tasks can be described as temporal-causal-reasoning tasks.…”