Event overview
Departmental Seminar Series: Dr Selma Dündar-Coecke and Prof. Andrew Tolmie
At the core of causal reasoning, invisible mechanism ties cause and effect together. This is typically studied in laboratory tasks involving simple machine-like systems with perceptually distinct causes and effects. In such contexts, many studies demonstrate causal reasoning from pre-school age (e.g., Buchanan & Sobel, 2011). Little is known, however, about how children then extend this reasoning to the continuous causal processes of the natural world. This is the goal of the discussion –to explore children’s causal reasoning about continuous natural processes – investigated across two studies. In three causal tasks, children (tested individually) first predicted what would happen in examples of sinking, absorption and dissolving processes (inspired by physics, biology, chemistry), then described their observations, and finally explained what they saw.
A series of tasks were used to explore the predictors of this kind of reasoning, from the domains of verbal (WASI expressive vocabulary) and nonverbal IQ (WASI block design), spatial (mental rotation, paper folding), spatial-temporal (flow of liquid, extrapolation of relative speed, Distance-Time-Velocity), probability (marbles, randomness, cards), and covariation (covariation I and II) analysis.
Findings:
1. Children’s causal performances improved with age.
2. Abstraction of causally relevant variables from the observations, and inference of invisible causal mechanisms was less frequently found, increasing significantly and slowly with age.
3. Ability to analyse spatial-temporal transformations also developed over the age range studied.
4. When we considered the predictors of children’s causal reasoning, two spatial-temporal tasks - one assessing the ability to reconstruct a spatial-temporal sequence, the other assessing the ability to configure spatial-temporal elements abstractly - were unique and central predictors of all levels of children’s causal reasoning, especially, as hypothesised, of inference of mechanism.
5. One spatial ability task predicted younger children’s causal performances.
6. There was a trade-off between verbal and nonverbal abilities depending on SES factors.
Most previous empirical treatments of how causal reasoning develops in pre-adolescents involved simplified systems with distinct causes and effects, but this study shows that is possible to extend research to causal reasoning about continuous natural processes. We conclude that causal reasoning about such processes, including inferences of causal mechanism, is already within the reach of children from school entry age, even when studied with demanding verbal report measures. The ability to analyze spatial-temporal information is the most important requirement in such continuous causality tasks. Our study is the first to highlight this important stepping stone towards scientific thinking about natural science phenomena.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 29 Nov 2018 | 4:00pm - 5:00pm |
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