Abstract
The temporal priority principle states that all causes must precede their effects. It is widely assumed that children’s causal reasoning is guided by this principle from early in development. However, the empirical studies that have examined children’s use of the principle, most of which were conducted some decades ago, in fact show inconsistent findings. Some researchers have argued that 3-year-olds reliably use this principle, whereas others have suggested that it is not until 5 years that children properly grasp the inviolability of the principle. To examine this issue, 100 children, 50 three-year-olds, and 50 four-year-olds, took part in a study in which they had to judge which of two causes yielded an effect. In the task, children saw one event (A), an effect (E), and then another event (B). The events A and B involved the rolling of balls down runways, and the effect E was a Jack-in-a-box popping up. The extent to which E left a visible trace was also varied, because comparisons across previous studies suggested that this may affect performance. As a group, 3- and 4-year-olds performed at above-chance levels, but performance improved with age. The nature of the effect did not have a significant impact on performance. Although some previous studies suggested that 3-year-olds may be more likely to choose B rather than A as a cause due to a recency effect, we found no evidence of this pattern of performance in the younger group. Potential explanations of the age-related improvement in performance are discussed.
Highlights
Much of the recent research on children’s causal learning has focused on their ability to use statistical information to make causal inferences, with such learning modeled using the causal Bayes net approach (e.g., Gopnik and Schulz, 2004; Gopnik et al, 2004; Sobel et al, 2004; Gopnik, 2012; see Lu et al, 2008; Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2009 for more recent Bayesian approaches to causal learning)
The temporal priority principle in causal reasoning states that causes always come before their effects in time, even though there may appear to be some circumstances in which cause and effect appear perfectly contemporaneous
Adopting the A–E–B paradigm, and using similar apparatus to that used in two influential studies, we attempted to discover whether the causal judgments of both 3- and 4-year-olds would reliably reflect the principle that causes must always precede their effects
Summary
Much of the recent research on children’s causal learning has focused on their ability to use statistical information to make causal inferences, with such learning modeled using the causal Bayes net approach (e.g., Gopnik and Schulz, 2004; Gopnik et al, 2004; Sobel et al, 2004; Gopnik, 2012; see Lu et al, 2008; Griffiths and Tenenbaum, 2009 for more recent Bayesian approaches to causal learning). Some philosophers have argued for the possibility of backward causation (Dummett, 1954), in everyday life there would never be a circumstance in which causal attributions would knowingly be in breach of the temporal priority principle, i.e., adults would never choose the succeeding event as the cause of a given effect. As this principle, and causal cognition more generally, is fundamental for success in the world which surrounds us, it is important that we determine the age at which the inviolability of the principle is properly appreciated
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