Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, United States of America.
Cognition. 2020 Aug;201:104315. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104315. Epub 2020 May 17.
We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task. Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel system composed of gears that could operate according to two possible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Given the choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of the two gears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), children demonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealed the true causal structure, and made subsequent causal judgments that were consistent with the outcome observed. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance was driven by children's tendency to select an intervention that would produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), rather than to disambiguate the causal structure. These results replicate our initial findings in a context in which the informative action was less likely to produce a positive outcome than the uninformative one. Experiment 3 serves as a control demonstrating that children's success in the previous experiments is not due to their use of low-level strategies. We discuss these findings in terms of their significance for understanding the development of scientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions in early causal learning.
我们研究了儿童是否会在因果学习任务中优先选择信息丰富的动作，并根据自己干预的结果做出准确的推断。4 至 6 岁的儿童被呈现出一个由齿轮组成的新系统，该系统可以根据两种可能的因果结构（单一或多个原因）运行。在干预（即，移除两个齿轮中的一个以单独观察剩余的齿轮）之间进行选择时，儿童明显更喜欢揭示真实因果结构的动作，并做出后续的因果判断，这些判断与观察到的结果一致。实验 2 探讨了儿童选择干预措施的倾向是否受到驱动，这种干预措施会产生理想的效果（即旋转齿轮），而不是为了澄清因果结构。这些结果在信息丰富的动作比非信息丰富的动作更不可能产生积极结果的情况下复制了我们最初的发现。实验 3 作为对照，证明了儿童在前一个实验中的成功不是由于他们使用了低级别的策略。我们根据这些发现讨论了它们对理解科学推理发展和自我导向动作在早期因果学习中的作用的意义。
