Abstract
Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children’s ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure to mechanism benefits children via the formation of abstract causal knowledge that supports epistemic evaluation. We tested 240 6–9 year-olds’ memory for concrete details and the ability to distinguish expertise before, immediately after, or a week after viewing a video about how combustion engines work. By around age 8, children who saw the video remembered mechanistic details and were better able to detect car-engine experts. Beyond detailed knowledge, the current results suggest that children also acquired an abstracted sense of how systems work that can facilitate epistemic reasoning.
Highlights
College-level science and engineering courses routinely simplify causal mechanisms, employing idealizations like frictionless surfaces, ideal gases, and perfectly inelastic interactions
All research conducted was approved by the Yale University IRB and adhered to all ethical regulations regarding human subjects
A post hoc power analysis, conducted via simulation using the SimR package in R39, confirmed that the current sample size had ample power to detect an effect of condition on expert-detection performance, 95% CI [0.92, 0.95]
Summary
College-level science and engineering courses routinely simplify causal mechanisms, employing idealizations like frictionless surfaces, ideal gases, and perfectly inelastic interactions. Educators often extend these simplifying practices to children by eliminating mechanistic details altogether in favor of isolated facts, high-level functions, methodology, and the nature of science[1,2,3]. Children’s own explanations tend to focus on causal relationships and can improve their memory for causal information[18,19,20] Together, these findings suggest that from an early age, children actively seek causal information and are sensitive to the causal properties and affordances of objects. While the representations underlying such epistemic inferences are currently unclear, the way that children generalize mechanistic knowledge selectively within, but not across, domains (e.g., knowing how a clock works implies knowledge of machines but not of flowers) suggests they are able to represent causal properties shared among related kinds
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