Investigating the development of causal inference by studying variability in 2- to 5-year-olds' behavior.

Tessa J P Van Schijndel,Ingmar Visser,Maartje E J Raijmakers,Kim Huijpen,Jacobus P Van Wouwe

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0195019

Tessa J P Van Schijndel, Ingmar Visser + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195019

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Apr 2, 2018
Citations: 1	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Amsterdam, Leiden University

Abstract

This study investigated the development of young children’s causal inference by studying variability in behavior. Two possible sources of variability, strategy use and accuracy in strategy execution, were discriminated and related to age. To this end, a relatively wide range of causal inference trials was administered to children of a relatively broad age range: 2- to 5-year-olds. Subsequently, individuals’ response patterns over trials were analyzed with a latent variable technique. The results showed that variability in children’s behavior could largely be explained by strategy use. Three different strategies were distinguished, and tentative interpretations suggest these could possibly be labeled as “rational”, “associative”, and “uncertainty avoidance” strategies. The strategies were found to be related to age, and this age-related strategy use better explained the variability in children’s behavior than age-related increase in accuracy of executing a single strategy. This study can be considered a first step in introducing a new, fruitful approach for investigating the development of causal inference.

Highlights

The question that has dominated the literature on children’s causal reasoning for the last decade is how new causal relations are learned and represented [1, 2]
Within groups that were considered to be capable of making a specific type of inference, percentages of succeeding children ranged from 72 to 100 for screeningoff inferences [5, 7, 8] and from 76 to 100 for indirect screening-off and backwards blocking inferences [8, 9] As mapping the variability in children’s behavior is considered of great importance in studying development [1], the goal of the present study is to further investigate the development of causal inference by studying variability in behavior
We set out to discriminate between two possible sources of variability, strategy use and accuracy in strategy execution, and relate these to age

Summary

Introduction

The question that has dominated the literature on children’s causal reasoning for the last decade is how new causal relations are learned and represented [1, 2]. A line of studies has investigated children’s ability to make causal inferences from a very young age on [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Each blicket detector trial measures a learner’s ability to make a specific type of causal inference, such as screening-off, indirect screening-off, or backwards blocking. Even though this line of work did not focus on investigating the development of causal inference, it has uncovered some developmental differences.

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