School of Educational Science, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou, Jiangsu, The People's Republic of China.
Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2018 Mar 21;13(3):e0192054. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192054. eCollection 2018.
Causal reasoning is an important aspect of scientific thinking. Even young human children can use causal reasoning to explain observations, make predictions, and design actions to bring about specific outcomes in the physical world. Weight is an interesting type of cause because it is an invisible property. Here, we tested preschool children with causal problem-solving tasks that assessed their understanding of weight. In an experimental setting, 2- to 5-year-old children completed three different tasks in which they had to use weight to produce physical effects-an object displacement task, a balance-scale task, and a tower-building task. The results showed that the children's understanding of how to use object weight to produce specific object-to-object causal outcomes improved as a function of age, with 4- and 5-year-olds showing above-chance performance on all three tasks. The younger children's performance was more variable. The pattern of results provides theoretical insights into which aspects of weight processing are particularly difficult for preschool children and why they find it difficult.
因果推理是科学思维的一个重要方面。即使是年幼的人类儿童也可以使用因果推理来解释观察结果、做出预测，并设计行动以在物理世界中带来特定结果。重量是一种有趣的因果类型，因为它是一种看不见的属性。在这里，我们用因果推理问题解决任务来测试学龄前儿童，以评估他们对重量的理解。在实验环境中，2 至 5 岁的儿童完成了三个不同的任务，他们必须使用重量来产生物理效应——一个物体位移任务、一个天平任务和一个塔建任务。结果表明，儿童理解如何使用物体重量来产生特定的物体到物体因果结果的能力随着年龄的增长而提高，4 岁和 5 岁的儿童在所有三个任务上的表现都超过了随机水平。年幼儿童的表现更具可变性。结果模式为理解学龄前儿童在哪些方面特别难以处理重量以及为什么他们觉得困难提供了理论上的见解。
