The role of spatial and spatial-temporal analysis in children’s causal cognition of continuous processes

Abstract

Past research has largely ignored children's ability to conjointly manipulate spatial and temporal information, but there are indications that the capacity to do so may provide important support for reasoning about causal processes. We hypothesised that spatial-temporal thinking is central to children's ability to identify the invisible mechanisms that tie cause and effect together in continuous casual processes, which are focal in primary school science and crucial to understanding of the natural world. We investigated this in two studies (N = 107, N = 124), employing two methodologies, one shorter, the other more in depth. Further tasks assessed spatial-temporal (flow of liquid, extrapolation of relative speed, distance-timevelocity), spatial (two mental rotation, paper folding), verbal (expressive vocabulary), and nonverbal (block design) ability. Age dependent patterns were detected for both causal and predictor tasks. Two spatial-temporal tasks were unique and central predictors of children's causal reasoning, especially inference of mechanism. Nonverbal ability predicted the simpler components of causal reasoning. One mental rotation task predicted only young children's causal thinking. Verbal ability became significant when the sample included children from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Causal reasoning about continuous processes, including inferences of causal mechanism, appears to be within the reach of children from school entry age, but mechanism inference is uncommon. Analytic forms of spatial-temporal capacity seem to be important requirements for children to progress to this rather than merely perceptual forms.

To What Extent Is General Intelligence Relevant to Causal Reasoning? A Developmental Study

“…Qualitatively, this explanation differs from the one concluding, for instance, “stone is heavier than the grape.” The former reflects the understanding and coordination of observables with the variants, even in the absence of scientific word knowledge of density. This relaxed scoring system meant that young children were not disqualified due to their developing scientific word knowledge; instead, the focus was on their reasoning and use of variables to think about causal phenomena, as previously used in Dündar-Coecke et al (2019 , 2020) . The inter-judge reliability was further assessed via a colleague peer review, who scored six randomly chosen anonymized and age-blind scoresheets from each year group, resulting in a 100% agreement rate.…”

“…Previous studies showed that children can acquire causal knowledge from the observation of such natural phenomena typically studied in elementary school science and encountered in everyday life. Such causal tasks require children to engage with mechanism-based thinking, in which underlying causal mechanisms need to be inferred from observable and unobservable structures ( Dündar-Coecke et al, 2019 , 2020 , 2021 ).…”

The Development of Spatial–Temporal, Probability, and Covariation Information to Infer Continuous Causal Processes

“…The scientific method causal tasks were developed by the authors and administered and scored as described for study 2 in Dündar-Coecke et al (2020) . The tasks followed a more realistic scientific procedure, with a sequence of observation, description, prediction, justification, and explanation.…”

“…We have recently begun to study children’s causal thinking in these types of dynamic natural processes, taking an individual difference approach and finding that measures of what we call spatial–temporal analysis were important predictors of children’s thinking about the causal mechanisms involved ( Dündar-Coecke et al, 2019 , 2020 ). Spatial–temporal analysis is the ability to think about how spatial configurations change over time.…”

“…In the present paper, we use a similar individual difference approach to return to the more Humean question of whether aspects of children’s statistical thinking also predict their causal reasoning about continuous processes, and how such statistical predictors compare to their spatial–temporal predictors. We present further data from the project reported in Dündar-Coecke et al (2019 , 2020) , which developed a set of novel tasks to look at children’s causal thinking about continuous processes (sinking, absorption, and dissolving). It also involved a large battery of spatial–temporal, spatial, verbal, and non-verbal reasoning tasks, as previously reported, and in addition, the set of statistical reasoning tasks that are the focus of the present paper.…”