Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning: Preschoolers use new contingency evidence to overcome prior spatial assumptions.

Abstract

This study examines preschoolers' causal assumptions about spatial contiguity and how these assumptions interact with new evidence in the form of conditional probabilities. Preschoolers saw a toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Children were shown evidence for the toy's activation rule in the form of patterns of probability: The toy was more likely to activate either when objects made contact with its surface (on condition) or when objects were several inches above its surface (over condition). In Experiment 1, 61 three-year-olds saw a deterministic activation rule. In Experiments 2 and 3, 48 four-year-olds saw an activation rule that was probabilistic. In Experiment 4, 30 four-year-olds saw a screening-off pattern of activation. In all 4 experiments, children used new evidence in the form of patterns of probability to make accurate causal inferences, even in the face of conflicting prior beliefs about spatial contiguity. However, children were more likely to make correct inferences when causes were spatially contiguous, particularly when faced with ambiguous evidence.

The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood

“…Control conditions established that children's inferences depend on the probability of the outcome given the intervention, not the frequency of the outcome or the number of failed interventions [4]. Several studies have since replicated this finding, showing that across a range of tasks, ages, and content domains, children use the conditional probability of events to make causal judgments ( [5][6][7][8][9]; see [10] for review).…”

“…Given, for instance, identical co-variation evidence, preschoolers are more likely to accept candidate causes that are common over those that are rare, and candidate causes that are theory consistent over those that are theory violating [32,33]. However, given sufficient evidence in support of an unlikely cause, preschoolers change their minds (e.g., about whether flipping a switch or talking to a toy will activate the toy [7], whether a toy will activate on contact or at a distance [6], or whether eating food or being scared causes a tummy ache [34,35]). In simple contexts, work has shown that even pre-verbal infants can use sparse data about the co-variation of interventions and outcomes to make rational causal attributions [36] (Figure 1).…”

Children balance theories and evidence in exploration, explanation, and learning

“…Everyday inference however, typically requires integrating prior beliefs and evidence. Considerable research suggests that even preschool children are capable of accurate causal judgments of this nature (see e.g., Kushnir & Gopnik, 2007;Sobel & Munro, 2009).…”

Of babies and birds: complex tool behaviours are not sufficient for the evolution of the ability to create a novel causal intervention

“…At around 4 years of age, children become able to causally intervene more generally. For example, children will infer causal relations when they observe two events that are linked temporally but not by physical contact [2,9,10], and when they observe correlations between events that simply occur naturally and are not the outcome of intentional actions. Moreover, they will design appropriate novel interventions when they infer more complex causal structures, differentiating, for example, between the appropriate actions on common causes or causal chains [11].…”