A non-Bayesian Account of the “Causal Reasoning” in Sobel, Tenenbaum & Gopnik (2004)
نویسنده
چکیده
Sobel, Tenenbaum & Gopnik (2004) investigated the development of causal inferences in preschoolers in three experiments with tasks adapted from conditioning literature (backwards blocking and screening-off) and concluded from this indirect evidence that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. It is proposed that (a) the differential performances in the two tasks are more likely due to differential memory demands, and (b) the observed developmental differences between 31⁄2 and 41⁄2-year old children may be due to maturation of the memory system, with higher retroactive interference in younger children and lower retroactive interference in older children. This account is supported by simulations with Ans & Rousset's (1997, 2000) memory self-refreshing neural networks architecture. The implications of the account proposed here on a theory of causal relation learning are discussed.
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