title: Just do it? Investigating the gap between prediction and action in toddlers' causal inferences.
abstract: Adults' causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn predictive relationships between physically connected events, they do not spontaneously initiate one event to try to generate the second (although older children, mean age: 47 months, do; Experiments 1 and 2). Toddlers succeed only when the events are initiated by a dispositional agent (Experiment 3), when the events involve direct contact between objects (Experiment 4), or when the events are described using causal language (Experiment 5). This suggests that causal language may help children extend their initial causal representations beyond agent-initiated and direct contact events.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. liz_b@berkeley.edu
authors.forename: Elizabeth Baraff
authors.initials: EB
authors.lastname: Bonawitz
authors.forename: Darlene
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ferranti
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Saxe
authors.forename: Alison
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gopnik
authors.forename: Andrew N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Meltzoff
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Woodward
authors.forename: Laura E
authors.initials: LE
authors.lastname: Schulz
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007858:Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*