Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego.
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark.
Psychol Sci. 2020 Feb;31(2):129-138. doi: 10.1177/0956797619898134. Epub 2020 Jan 21.
We assessed whether an artifact's design can facilitate recognition of abstract causal rules. In Experiment 1, 152 three-year-olds were presented with evidence consistent with a relational rule (i.e., pairs of same or different blocks activated a machine) using two differently designed machines. In the standard-design condition, blocks were placed on top of the machine; in the relational-design condition, blocks were placed into openings on either side. In Experiment 2, we assessed whether this design cue could facilitate adults' ( = 102) inference of a distinct conjunctive cause (i.e., that two blocks together activate the machine). Results of both experiments demonstrated that causal inference is sensitive to an artifact's design: Participants in the relational-design conditions were more likely to infer rules that were a priori unlikely. Our findings suggest that reasoning failures may result from difficulty generating the relevant rules as cognitive hypotheses but that artifact design aids causal inference. These findings have clear implications for creating intuitive learning environments.
我们评估了人工制品的设计是否可以促进对抽象因果规则的识别。在实验 1 中，152 名 3 岁儿童使用两种不同设计的机器呈现出与关系规则一致的证据（即，相同或不同的块对激活机器）。在标准设计条件下，块放在机器顶部；在关系设计条件下，块放在机器两侧的开口处。在实验 2 中，我们评估了这种设计线索是否可以促进成年人（n = 102）对独特结合原因的推断（即两个块一起激活机器）。两个实验的结果都表明，因果推理对人工制品的设计很敏感：在关系设计条件下的参与者更有可能推断出先验不太可能的规则。我们的发现表明，推理失败可能是由于难以将相关规则作为认知假设生成，但人工制品设计有助于因果推理。这些发现对创建直观的学习环境具有明确的意义。
