This purpose of this project is to explore the origins of scientific reasoning in early childhood through innovative experiments investigating young children?s learning about probabilistic cause-effect relationships in informal settings. Children?s ability to learn from observing probabilistic causal outcomes is an ecologically valid, but understudied issue with implications for STEM educational theory and practice. Much of the causal learning that takes place in infancy and early childhood is by the observation of other people?s actions. Crucially, learning about causes in informal, non-laboratory settings means that an observer often needs to learn cause-effect relationships from probabilistic evidence?observing relations or patterns that do not occur with 100% certainty. This proposal has three objectives: To establish whether young children learn about physical causal relationships from the observation of probabilistic evidence; To investigate whether young children learn about social causal relationships from the observation of probabilistic causal evidence; To investigate whether young children observing a confounded causal system preferentially attribute probabilistic outcomes to variability in social causes or to variability in physical causes.
This project proposes a series of five converging experiments using a newly established methodology to examine the developmental roots of probabilistic causal reasoning in children as young as 24 months of age. In Experiments 1 and 2 young children will observe probabilistic causal displays involving physical objects. In Experiments 3 and 4 children will observe a pattern of probabilistic causal evidence between social agents?people interacting with one another?instead of physical objects. In Experiment 5 children will observe a confounded probabilistic causal display in which the probabilistic nature of the causal relationship could either be attributed to the person performing the intervention or to the physical object being acted upon. In each experiment, the dependent measure is what goal-directed action children take on their own to achieve the outcome based on what they observed.
