Can being scared cause tummy aches? Naive theories, ambiguous evidence, and preschoolers' causal inferences.
Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domain-general statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, the authors presented preschoolers with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard 2 stories in which 2 candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the form: AB?E; CA?E; AD?E; and so forth. In 1 story, all variables came from the same domain; in the other, the recurring candidate cause, A, came from a different domain (A was a psychological cause of a biological effect). After receiving this statistical evidence, children were asked to identify the cause of the effect on a new trial. Consistent with the predictions of a Bayesian model, all children were more likely to identify A as the cause within domains than across domains. Whereas 3.5-year-olds learned only from the within-domain evidence, 4- and 5-year-olds learned from the cross-domain evidence and were able to transfer their new expectations about psychosomatic causality to a novel task.
Schulz
Laura E
LE
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. lschulz@mit.edu
Bonawitz
Elizabeth Baraff
EB
Griffiths
Thomas L
TL
D015746:Abdominal Pain / Q000523:psychology*; D000367:Age Factors; D001245:Association Learning; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D015984:Causality; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003469:Culture; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D005793:Generalization, Psychological; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D011337:Probability Learning; D013001:Somatoform Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D013067:Speech Perception; D014163:Transfer, Psychology