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

Engagement in Philosophical Dialogue Facilitates Children’s Reasoning About Subjectivity

Theories of learning have long emphasized the essential role of social factors in the development of early reasoning abilities. More recently, it has been proposed that the presentation of conflicting perspectives may facilitate young children's understanding of knowledge claims as potentially subjective-one of many possible representations of the world. This development in epistemological understanding has been proposed to be an important determinant of academic performance and is highly correlated with the ability to understand and produce sound argumentation in adolescents and adults. In a longitudinal study of children 7-8 years old, we assessed the effects of a 3-month philosophy class designed to engage children in dialogic interaction with peers. We examined the influence of this intervention on children's epistemological understanding and argumentation skills in 4 domains of knowledge: aesthetic, value, social, and physical. Participation in dialogic interaction in an elementary school classroom improved children's ability to construct their own and opposing arguments across domains and facilitated reasoning about the subjectivity of knowledge in the value domain

A Tale of Three Platforms: Investigating Preschoolers’ Second-Order Inferences Using In-Person, Zoom, and Lookit Methodologies

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, online methodologies for developmental research have become an essential norm. Already, there are numerous options for recruiting and testing developmental participants, and they differ from each other in a variety of ways. While recent research has discussed the potential benefits and practical trade-offs of these different platforms, the potential empirical consequences of choosing among them are still unknown. It is critical for the field to understand not only how children's performance in an online context compares to traditional settings, but also how it differs across online platforms. This study offers the first comparative look at the same developmental task across different online research methodologies, allowing for direct comparison and critical examination of each. We conducted three versions of a test of preschoolers' ability to generate and apply second-order inferences to predict novel outcomes. Experiment 1 is an in-person task conducted at public testing sites in the vicinity of the university. In Experiment 2, we conducted an online-moderated version of the same task, in which an experimenter presented a recording of the procedure during a live video call with families over Zoom. Finally, Experiment 3 is an online-unmoderated version of the task, in which the same videos were presented entirely asynchronously using the Lookit platform. Results suggest that online methodologies may introduce difficulties and age-related differences in young children's performance not observed in person. We consider these results in light of the previous online developmental replications, suggest possible interpretations, and offer initial recommendations to help future developmental scientists make informed choices about whether and how to conduct their research online

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

Relational abstraction in early childhood: Three cultures and three trajectories

Abstract reasoning in early childhood is often described as following a "relational shift," over which children become increasingly sensitive to relations. However, recent work has challenged the generality of this account, showing that children in the US and China follow distinct trajectories in a relational match-to-sample task (Carstensen et al., 2019). This difference aligns with multiple cultural and linguistic factors implicated in relational reasoning, in which English speakers in the US and Mandarin speakers in China appear at opposite ends of a continuum spanning from a focus on objects (US) to relations (CN). We explore early relational reasoning in a context that represents a cultural middle ground with a key linguistic similarity (noun spurts) to the US: Korean-learning children in South Korea. In two experiments with 262 Korean children, we document relational reasoning in this novel cultural context, revealing similarities and differences to developmental trajectories in the US and China

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

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