Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded

Abstract

Researchers, educators, and parents have long believed that children learn cause and effect relationships through exploratory play. However, previous research suggests that children are poor at designing informative experiments; children fail to control relevant variables and tend to alter multiple variables simultaneously. Thus, little is known about how children's spontaneous exploration might support accurate causal inferences. Here we suggest that children's exploratory play is affected by the quality of the evidence they observe. Using a novel free-play paradigm, we show that preschoolers (mean age: 57 months) distinguish confounded and unconfounded evidence, preferentially explore causally confounded (but not matched unconfounded) toys rather than novel toys, and spontaneously disambiguate confounded variables in the course of free play.KEWORDS: causal learning, exploratory play, preschoolers' scientific reasoning, ambiguous evidence, confounded variables CONFOUNDING AND PLAY 3 Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded Causal knowledge is fundamental to our understanding of the world. It informs our moral judgments, our explanations of the past, and our plans for the future. Little wonder that Hume called causal knowledge the "cement of the universe" (1740/2000). However, relatively little is known about how children learn the causal structure of events.Piaget believed that young children came to understand causal relationships through active exploration of their environment (1930). Recent research suggests that very young children know much more about the causal structure of the world than Piaget believed (Baillargeon, Kotovsky, & Needham, 1995;Flavell, Green, & Flavell, 1995;Gelman & Wellman, 1991;Kalish, 1996;Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Saxe, Tenenbaum, & Carey, 2005;Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992). However, the idea at the heart of the Piagetian account --that children "construct" knowledge (and particularly causal knowledge) by active exploration --remains widely accepted.Yet despite substantial agreement that children learn through play (e.g., Bruner, Jolly, & Sylva, 1976;Singer, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2006), little is known about how exploratory play might support accurate causal inferences. Descriptive studies of play are more common than experimental research or theoretical accounts, and much of the seminal work on exploratory play predates recent research on children's causal reasoning (Berlyne, 1954;Piaget, 1951). Except for the well-established finding that children (and many non-human animals) selectively explore novel stimuli (Berlyne, 1960;Dember & Earl, 1957;Henderson & Moore, 1980; Hutt & Bhaynani, 1972;Pavlov, 1927), there is CONFOUNDING AND PLAY 4 little evidence for systematic patterns in children's exploratory behavior. Moreover, considerable research suggests that even older children and naïve adults are poor at designing causally informative experiments and have difficulty anticipating the type of evidence that would s...

Violations of Core Knowledge Shape Early Learning

“…This tradition, too, has a long history-at least as far back as Piaget, who suggested that children experience some aspects of the world as fitting neatly within existing mental models (in which case new information is assimilated into children's representations), and other aspects of the world as conflicting with existing beliefs or expectations (in which case the new information requires accommodation) (Piaget, 1970; see also Kagan, 2002). Contemporary research in cognitive development finds that young children indeed modify their exploration and explanations following events that fail to accord with expectations (e.g., Bonawitz, van Schijndel, Friel, & Schulz, 2012;Legare, 2012;Legare, Gelman, & Wellman, 2010;Legare, Schult, Impola, & Souza, 2016;van Schijndel, Visser, van Bers, & Raijmakers, 2015;Schulz, 2012;Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007). For example, children prefer to explore a familiar toy over a novel one when the familiar toy produced an outcome that was unexpected (Bonawitz et al, 2012), and they show an increased tendency to produce verbal explanations of events that do not fit with newly acquired knowledge (Legare et al, 2010(Legare et al, , 2016.…”

Children’s Exploration of Physical Phenomena During Object Play

“…These researchers have found that when children encounter novel objects and phenomena in playful situations, they ask questions (e.g., Legare, Mills, Souza, Plummer, & Yasskin, 2013) and entertain various hypotheses about their use (e.g., Legare 2012Legare , 2014, formulate "experiments" and play more to disambiguate possible causes or effects (e.g., Cook, Goodman, & Schulz, 2011;Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), and learn about the causal structure of objects through their own interventions (e.g., Sobel & Sommerville, 2010). For instance, in an experimental study, Legare (2012) found that when preschoolers encountered outcomes inconsistent with their prior experiences of whether or not particular blocks made a pair of boxes light up (in the classic "blicket detector" paradigm), their exploratory behaviors were related to the causal explanations they provided.…”

Bayesian models of child development

“…Work by Schulz and colleagues support this idea, showing that children choose to explore in cases where the prior beliefs and evidence interact in away that leads competing hypotheses to be roughly equivalent [69,[71][72][73] .…”