Young Children’s Attribution of Causality under Uncertainty

In previous studies, causal contingencies have been suggested to play an important role in causality judgments. However, little is known about how children might use causal contingencies to inform their judgments of causality, especially under uncertainty. In the current study, we found that young children are sensitive to both conditional and unconditional causal contingencies. Furthermore, children’s performance was remarkably similar to the performance of adults in previous studies. Children’s sensitivity to statistical properties is a robust finding across a number of cognitive domains and might reflect an application of a fundamental cognitive mechanism that directs cognition, more generally, rather than only causal knowledge acquisition.