知道何时需要帮助：因果复杂性意识的发展
Knowing When Help Is Needed: A Developing Sense of Causal Complexity.
作者信息
Kominsky Jonathan F, Zamm Anna P, Keil Frank C
机构信息
Department of Psychology, Harvard University.
Department of Psychology, McGill University.
出版信息
Cogn Sci. 2018 Mar;42(2):491-523. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12509. Epub 2017 Jul 4.
Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on "mechanism metadata," information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.
关于认知劳动分工的研究发现，成年人以及年仅5岁的儿童都能够为不同的因果系统找到合适的专家。然而，几乎没有研究探讨过儿童和成年人最初是如何决定何时去寻求专家知识的。我们提出，儿童和成年人（部分地）依赖于“机制元数据”，即有关机制信息的信息。我们认为，对于接触了相似数量机制信息的个体而言，机制元数据相对一致，并且它适用于广泛的因果系统。在三项实验中，我们表明，成年人以及年仅5岁的儿童对不同因果系统的因果复杂性有着一致的认知，并且这种复杂性认知与关于何时寻求专家知识的决策有关，但在成长过程中，关注点会从程序信息转向内部机制信息。
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