Abstract
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.
Highlights
Causal representations are central to human cognition
Adults are adept at reasoning about causal events initiated by an intentional, goaldirected action, an inanimate object, or an unobserved entity
Considerable research suggests the sophistication of children’s causal reasoning even early in development [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15], children are almost uniformly asked to reason about events initiated by dispositional agents
Summary
Causal representations are central to human cognition. They support prediction, explanation, and intervention and underlie folk theories across domains [2,3,4]. Evidence that event A predicts event B suggests the possibility that intervening on A might generate B (i.e., intervening on A to see if B occurs is a good way to learn whether the relationship is genuinely causal) Both fouryear-olds and toddlers readily learned the predictive relationship, only four-year-olds anticipated the outcome following their intervention (i.e., looked towards the toy after placing the block in contact with the base). If toddlers lack a domain-general concept of causation and only integrate prediction and action when events are initiated by agents, they should fail to represent the predictive event as a causal event in both conditions because the block always begins to move spontaneously; agents are never involved in initiating the events.
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