Abstract
Young children, in general, appear to have a strong drive to explore the environment in ways that reveal its underlying causal structure. But are they really attuned specifically to casual information in this quest for understanding, or do they show equal interest in other types of non-obvious information about the world? To answer this question, we introduced 20 three-year-old children to two puppets who were anxious to tell the child about a set of novel artifacts and animals. One puppet consistently described causal properties of the items while the other puppet consistently described carefully matched non-causal properties of the same items. After a familiarization period in which children learned which type of information to expect from each informant, children were given the opportunity to choose which they wanted to hear describe each of eight pictured test items. On average, children chose to hear from the informant that provided causal descriptions on 72% of the trials. This preference for causal information has important implications for explaining the role of conceptual information in supporting early learning and may suggest means for maximizing interest and motivation in young children.
Highlights
Causal information appears to have special status in the minds of young children
PARTICIPANTS Because we were interested in why causal information might facilitate learning, we focused on 3-year-olds, an age at which www.frontiersin.org
Further reflecting the lack of correspondence between preferences for description-type and informant is the fact that children requested causal information with equal frequency during description-type testing regardless of which informant they chose during the post-test (M = 5.75, SD = 2.0 vs. M = 5.63, SD = 1.33)
Summary
Even infants have a sophisticated sensitivity to the causal structure of their world (e.g., Oakes and Cohen, 1994; Gopnik et al, 2001; Legare et al, 2010; Mascalzoni et al, 2013). This sensitivity appears to support early categorization, word learning, and memory more generally speaking (e.g., Bauer and Mandler, 1989; Booth and Waxman, 2002; Booth, 2008, 2009). We reasoned that if causal information facilitates learning because of its intrinsic interest, we should be able to observe that interest in children’s preferences
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