The Importance of Discovery in Children's Causal Learning from Interventions

David Marc Sobel · Jessica A. Sommerville

85 citations0/0 files storedFrontiers in Psychology

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Child and Animal Learning Development Science Education and Pedagogy Bayesian Modeling and Causal Inference

Abstract

Four-year-olds were more accurate at learning causal structures from their own actions when they were allowed to act first and then observe an experimenter act, as opposed to observing first and then acting on the environment. Children who discovered the causal efficacy of events (as opposed to confirming the efficacy of events that they observed another discover) were also more accurate than children who only observed the experimenter act on the environment; accuracy in the confirmation and observation conditions was at similar levels. These data suggest that while children learn from acting on the environment, not all self-generated action produces equivalent causal learning.

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References

1952The origins of intelligence in children.2004Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning?1990The Child's Theory of Mind 2006THE ACT OF DISCOVERY 2005Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions 1988Infant Imitation and Memory: Nine-Month-Olds in Immediate and Deferred Tests 2001Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: Two-, three-, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation.2007Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded.

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2018Learning Landscapes: Playing the Way to Learning and Engagement in Public Spaces 2014Preschoolers perform more informative experiments after observing theory-violating evidence 2017Causal learning is collaborative: Examining explanation and exploration in social contexts 2018From Exploration to Instruction: Children Learn From Exploration and Tailor Their Demonstrations to Observers’ Goals and Competence

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