Giving the giggles: prediction, intervention, and young children's representation of psychological events.
Adults recognize that if event A predicts event B, intervening on A might generate B. Research suggests that young children have difficulty making this inference unless the events are initiated by goal-directed actions [1]. The current study tested the domain-generality and development of this phenomenon. Replicating previous work, when the events involved a physical outcome, toddlers (mean: 24 months) failed to generalize the outcome of spontaneously occurring predictive events to their own interventions; toddlers did generalize from prediction to intervention when the events involved a psychological outcome. We discuss these findings as they bear on the development of causal concepts.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. pmuenten@mit.edu
Paul
P
Muentener
Daniel
D
Friel
Laura
L
Schulz
D002652:Child Behavior; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory