Abstract
The present study examines how children revise beliefs in the face of a new piece of information that they must accept as true and under what circumstances their belief-revision processes differ from college-aged adults. Results suggest that overall, 7-year-old children (children at Stage 2 reasoning; Moshman, 1990) revise beliefs as do adults, by rejecting particular beliefs in favour of more general ones. However, only adults adjust their revision strategy as a consequence of the logical structure of the initial belief set. Adults, but not children, tend to organise their revised beliefs to be consistent with general statements more often when the set of beliefs create a Modus Tollens logic structure than when they create a Modus Ponens structure. This difference in belief revision by the two age groups reflects their sensitivity to logical structure.
Highlights
A typical child, as well as an adult, spends a considerable portion of her early life adding and revising hypotheses and beliefs about the way the world works (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1974)
One way to understand this fundamental belief revision process is to view it as the action of a set of mechanisms embodied in counterfactual reasoning
The precursors to adults, appear to follow counterfactual reasoning in their pretend play (e.g., Nichols & Stich, 2000), but are other aspects of their counterfactual thinking processes similar in other ways to adults? The present study examines this question using a paradigm employed in adult research of belief revision
Summary
A typical child, as well as an adult, spends a considerable portion of her early life adding and revising hypotheses and beliefs about the way the world works (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith & Inhelder, 1974). One way to understand this fundamental belief revision process is to view it as the action of a set of mechanisms embodied in counterfactual reasoning. Guajardo and Turley-Ames (2004) showed that children from the age of 3 can generate an alternative antecedent in response to a counterfactual outcome after hearing a story (counterfactual antecedent tasks), and vice versa for counterfactual consequent tasks. Their performance on these tasks increased between the age of 3 and 5. How do people normally absorb facts that conflict with their enduring beliefs and how do children adapt to this kind of situation? Should adult reasoning processes be modelled as structurally different from the child’s or do they both rely on the same basic processes?
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