Abstract
Causal illusions occur when people perceive a causal relation between two events that are actually unrelated. One factor that has been shown to promote these mistaken beliefs is the outcome probability. Thus, people tend to overestimate the strength of a causal relation when the potential consequence (i.e. the outcome) occurs with a high probability (outcome-density bias). Given that children and adults differ in several important features involved in causal judgment, including prior knowledge and basic cognitive skills, developmental studies can be considered an outstanding approach to detect and further explore the psychological processes and mechanisms underlying this bias. However, the outcome density bias has been mainly explored in adulthood, and no previous evidence for this bias has been reported in children. Thus, the purpose of this study was to extend outcome-density bias research to childhood. In two experiments, children between 6 and 8 years old were exposed to two similar setups, both showing a non-contingent relation between the potential cause and the outcome. These two scenarios differed only in the probability of the outcome, which could either be high or low. Children judged the relation between the two events to be stronger in the high probability of the outcome setting, revealing that, like adults, they develop causal illusions when the outcome is frequent.
Highlights
Causal learning is an essential tool for adapting to the environment
Both characters were poor farmers but the plants grew with high probability for one character and with low probability for the other
If outcome probability biases children’s performance, they will assign a higher rating to the character in the High p(O) condition than to the character in the Low p(O) condition
Summary
Causal learning is an essential tool for adapting to the environment. Among other things, it allows for predicting changes, and for adjusting our behavior to deal with such changes. Attentional control (i.e. attending to the specific cue and outcome under evaluation while filtering out irrelevant information) may be a crucial factor for causal learning and the development of causal biases These abilities are known to mature through childhood and early adolescence [61,62], suggesting that children might show different patterns from adults when judging causal relationships under outcome-density manipulations. The present study will examine the outcome-density effect in children younger than ten years old (before the alleged “perceptual encoding switch” and the complete maturation of the cognitive functions previously mentioned, but old enough to follow an adult-like procedure) by using a child-friendly version of the observational (or passive) contingency learning task [12] in which participants are exposed to the sequence of events, without deciding themselves when the cause was to be present. The outcome probability was manipulated to promote an outcome-density effect that is expected to bias children’s causal judgments
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