Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94708, USA.
Dev Psychol. 2012 Jul;48(4):1156-64. doi: 10.1037/a0026471. Epub 2011 Dec 26.
A growing literature suggests that generating and evaluating explanations is a key mechanism for learning and inference, but little is known about how children generate and select competing explanations. This study investigates whether young children prefer explanations that are simple, where simplicity is quantified as the number of causes invoked in an explanation, and how this preference is reconciled with probability information. Both preschool-aged children and adults were asked to explain an event that could be generated by 1 or 2 causes, where the probabilities of the causes varied across conditions. In 2 experiments, it was found that children preferred explanations involving 1 cause over 2 but were also sensitive to the probability of competing explanations. Adults, in contrast, responded on the basis of probability alone. These data suggest that children employ a principle of parsimony like Occam's razor as an inductive constraint and that this constraint is employed when more reliable bases for inference are unavailable.
越来越多的文献表明，生成和评估解释是学习和推理的关键机制，但对于儿童如何生成和选择竞争解释知之甚少。本研究调查了幼儿是否更喜欢简单的解释，其中简单性被量化为解释中调用的原因数量，以及这种偏好如何与概率信息协调。学前儿童和成年人都被要求解释一个可以由 1 个或 2 个原因产生的事件，其中原因的概率在不同条件下变化。在 2 项实验中，研究发现，儿童更喜欢涉及 1 个原因的解释，而不是 2 个原因的解释，但也对竞争解释的概率敏感。相比之下，成年人仅根据概率做出反应。这些数据表明，儿童将奥卡姆剃刀等简约原则用作归纳约束，并且在没有更可靠的推理依据时会使用这种约束。
