Time and interventions in children's causal structure learning
Lead Research Organisation:
Queen's University Belfast
Department Name: Sch of Psychology
Abstract
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Organisations
Publications
Frosch CA
(2012)
Are causal structure and intervention judgments inextricably linked? A developmental study.
in Cognitive science
McCormack T
(2016)
Children's use of interventions to learn causal structure.
in Journal of experimental child psychology
McCormack T
(2015)
Temporal and statistical information in causal structure learning.
in Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition
Hoerl, Christoph; McCormack, Teresa; Beck, Sarah R.
(2011)
Understanding Counterfactuals, Understanding Causation: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology
| Description | Imagine that you encounter three events A, B and C that tend to occur together. What are the relationships between A, B, and C? Perhaps A causes B which in turn causes C (an ABC causal chain), or perhaps A causes B and also independently causes C. Research on what is termed causal structure learning examines the ways in which we go about figuring out the structure of the relationships between events. When we learn about causal structure, we are essentially learning about how the world works, and as such this type of learning is fundamental to the development of knowledge itself. This project examined how causal structure learning changes as children get older. We found that even 5-year-olds can use simple temporal cues to figure out causal structure (e.g., if A happens before B and then B before C, children assume a causal chain ABC), but children up to 8-9 years had difficulty using information about the statistical dependencies between events in learning causal structure. Children needed much richer evidence than adults to make accurate causal structure judgements. Moreover, we found that children of all ages found it difficult to predict what would happen if a component in a causal system was fixed or altered (for example, if the structure was a causal chain ABC, they did not predict that C cannot happen without B). Our findings suggest important differences between children's and adults' causal structure learning. |
| Exploitation Route | Causal learning is crucial in the context of scientific reasoning, and our findings with children potentially shed some light on the limitations that younger children may face when grappling with learning about particular systems or processes as part of science education. The suggest that younger children fall back on simple heuristics when making some types of judgments, and find it hard to reason about the relations between different events in a causal system. |
| Sectors | Electronics |