Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gillman Dr., # 0109, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0109, USA.
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University - Newark, 334 Smith Hall, Newark, NJ, 07102, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Oct;24(5):1538-1547. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1144-0.
Research suggests that the process of explaining influences causal reasoning by prompting learners to favor hypotheses that offer "good" explanations. One feature of a good explanation is its simplicity. Here, we investigate whether prompting children to generate explanations for observed effects increases the extent to which they favor causal hypotheses that offer simpler explanations, and whether this changes over the course of development. Children aged 4, 5, and 6 years observed several outcomes that could be explained by appeal to a common cause (the simple hypothesis) or two independent causes (the complex hypothesis). We varied whether children were prompted to explain each observation or, in a control condition, to report it. Children were then asked to make additional inferences for which the competing hypotheses generated different predictions. The results revealed developmental differences in the extent to which children favored simpler hypotheses as a basis for further inference in this task: 4-year-olds did not favor the simpler hypothesis in either condition; 5-year-olds favored the simpler hypothesis only when prompted to explain; and 6-year-olds favored the simpler hypothesis whether or not they explained.
研究表明，解释过程通过促使学习者青睐提供“好”解释的假设来影响因果推理。一个好解释的特征是其简单性。在这里，我们研究了提示儿童对观察到的效应进行解释是否会增加他们青睐提供更简单解释的因果假设的程度，以及这种情况是否随着发展而变化。4、5 和 6 岁的儿童观察了几种可以用共同原因（简单假设）或两个独立原因（复杂假设）来解释的结果。我们改变了儿童是否被提示解释每个观察结果，或者在控制条件下报告观察结果。然后，要求儿童对产生不同预测的竞争假设进行其他推断。结果显示，在这个任务中，儿童根据进一步推断而青睐更简单假设的程度存在发展差异：4 岁儿童在两种情况下都不青睐更简单的假设；5 岁儿童只有在被提示解释时才青睐更简单的假设；而 6 岁儿童无论是否解释，都青睐更简单的假设。
