Informative experimentation in intuitive science: Children select and learn from their own causal interventions.

We investigated whether children preferentially select informative actions and make accurate inferences from the outcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task. Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel system composed of gears that could operate according to two possible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Given the choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of the two gears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), children demonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealed the true causal structure, and made subsequent causal judgments that were consistent with the outcome observed. Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance was driven by children's tendency to select an intervention that would produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), rather than to disambiguate the causal structure. These results replicate our initial findings in a context in which the informative action was less likely to produce a positive outcome than the uninformative one. Experiment 3 serves as a control demonstrating that children's success in the previous experiments is not due to their use of low-level strategies. We discuss these findings in terms of their significance for understanding the development of scientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions in early causal learning

Achieving abstraction: Generating far analogies promotes relational reasoning in children.

Analogical reasoning is essential for transfer by supporting recognition of relational similarity. However, not all analogies are created equal. The source and target can be similar (near), or quite different (far). Previous research suggests that close comparisons facilitate children's relational abstraction. On the other hand, evidence from adults indicates that the process of solving far analogies may be a more effective scaffold for transfer of a relational strategy. We explore whether engaging with far analogies similarly induces such a strategy in preschoolers. Children were provided with the opportunity to solve either a near or far spatial analogy using a pair of puzzle boxes that varied in perceptual similarity (Experiment 1), or to participate in a control task (Experiment 2). All groups were then presented with an ambiguous spatial reasoning task featuring both object and relational matches. We were interested in the relationship between near and far conditions and two effects: (a) children's tendency to spontaneously draw an analogy when solving the initial puzzle, and (b) their tendency to privilege relational matches over object matches in a subsequent, ambiguous task. Although children were more likely to spontaneously draw an analogy in the near condition, those who attempted the far analogy were more likely to privilege a relational match on the subsequent task. We argue that the process of solving a far analogy-regardless of a learner's spontaneous success in identifying the relation-contextualizes an otherwise ambiguous learning problem, making it easier for children to access and apply relational hypotheses. (PsycINFO Database Recor

Asking "why?" and "what if?": The influence of questions on children's inferences

This chapter describes a growing body of work that demonstrates the efficacy of specific questions (“why” “why else?” and “what if?”) in supporting children’s ability to access their intuitive reasoning skills and apply them to tasks involving sophisticated causal and scientific thinking. We describe distinct mechanisms by which each of these questions results in unique types of inferences, and argue that each one has selective effects on a learner’s inferences, depending upon the evidence available, the state of their prior knowledge, and the relation of that prior knowledge to the true state of the world. We begin with a brief review of the well-established research on the efficacy of prompts for explanation, focusing on the developmental literature. We then offer a novel proposal, drawing on the adult research, that engaging children in the evaluation of alternative outcomes via prompting for multiple explanations or engagement with counterfactuals may provide a different avenue for fostering distinct sets of causal reasoning skills. Finally, we turn to a discussion of the relation between the content and process of children’s reasoning in response to these questions, and end with some suggestions for future research

The role of symbol-based experience in early learning and transfer from pictures: Evidence from Tanzania.

Extensive exposure to representational media is common for infants in Western culture, and previous research has shown that soon after their 1st birthday, infants can acquire and extend new information from pictures to real objects. Here we explore the extent to which lack of exposure to pictures during infancy affects children's learning from pictures. Infants were recruited from a rural village in Tanzania and had no prior experience with pictures. After a picture book interaction during which a novel depicted object was labeled, we assessed infants' learning and transfer of the label from pictures to their referents. In a 2nd study, we assessed infants' learning and generalization of new names using real objects, rather than pictures. Tanzanian infants demonstrated a similar pattern of learning and generalization from real objects, when compared with infants in Western culture. However, there was a significant difference in learning and generalization from pictures to real objects. These findings provide evidence for the important role of early experience with representational media in children's ability to use pictures as a source of information about the world

Discriminating relational and perceptual judgments: Evidence from human toddlers

The ability to represent same-different relations is an important condition for abstract thought. However, there is mixed evidence for when this ability develops, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. Apparent success in relational reasoning may be evidence for genuine conceptual understanding or may be the result of low-level, perceptual strategies. We introduce a method to discriminate these possibilities by pitting two conditions that are perceptually matched but conceptually different: in a "fused" condition, same and different objects are joined, creating single objects that have the same perceptual features as the two object pairs in the "relational" condition. However, the "fused" objects do not provide evidence for the relation 'same.' Using this method with human toddlers in a causal relational reasoning task provides evidence for genuine conceptual understanding. This novel technique offers a simple manipulation that may be applied to a variety of existing match-to-sample procedures used to assess same-different reasoning to include in future research with non-human animals across species, as well as human infants

Influence of natural and synthetic estrogens on the course of autoimmune disease in the nzb/nzw mouse

Antinuclear antibodies were found in 64% of serum samples obtained from male NZB/NZW mice after 6 weeks of treatment with mestranol. Both female and male mice responded to this synthetic female hormone with marked elevations of serum Α 2 - and Β-globulins; Γ-globulins were not increased. There was no evidence that mestranol accelerated the development of autoimmune renal disease in these animals. Treatment of hybrid New Zealand mice with mestranol, 17-Β-estradiol and oophorectomy exerts divergent effects on serum proteins and the development of serologic abnormalities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/37723/1/1780160215_ftp.pd

Tactics and Strategic Action

We discuss the dominant approaches to the analysis of social movement tactics and strategies. If there is broad agreement among scholars about their importance to the performance and understanding of collective action, there is considerably less consensus on how best to explain the decisions over tactics and strategy that social movements make, the extent to which decisions reflect individual or group preferences, or the importance that should be accorded to the micro and macro levels of analysis. The debates concerning these questions provide the main focus of our discussion, from contentious politics to actor-centered and interactionist approaches

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties

Four experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3- to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal property. Experiment 2 replicated this effect of explanation in a case of label extension (i.e., categorization). Experiment 3 demonstrated that explanation improves memory for clusters of causally relevant (non-perceptual) features, but impairs memory for superficial (perceptual) features, providing evidence that effects of explanation are selective in scope and apply to memory as well as inference. In sum, our data support the proposal that engaging in explanation influences children's reasoning by privileging inductively rich, causal properties

Effects of explaining on children's preference for simpler hypotheses

Research suggests that the process of explaining influences causal reasoning by prompting learners to favor hypotheses that offer "good" explanations. One feature of a good explanation is its simplicity. Here, we investigate whether prompting children to generate explanations for observed effects increases the extent to which they favor causal hypotheses that offer simpler explanations, and whether this changes over the course of development. Children aged 4, 5, and 6 years observed several outcomes that could be explained by appeal to a common cause (the simple hypothesis) or two independent causes (the complex hypothesis). We varied whether children were prompted to explain each observation or, in a control condition, to report it. Children were then asked to make additional inferences for which the competing hypotheses generated different predictions. The results revealed developmental differences in the extent to which children favored simpler hypotheses as a basis for further inference in this task: 4-year-olds did not favor the simpler hypothesis in either condition; 5-year-olds favored the simpler hypothesis only when prompted to explain; and 6-year-olds favored the simpler hypothesis whether or not they explained