Removing the Time Crutch: Can preschoolers still make causal judgments?
نویسنده
چکیده
Current theories of cognitive developmental debate the extent to which children’s cognition depends on a priori conceptual knowledge. The current set of experiments explores this debate in the domain of causal reasoning: To what degree do preschoolers rely on knowledge about causal relations vs. attention to temporal structure? In three experiments, causal structure and temporal order were either in correspondence or in conflict with each other. Results show a pronounced difference between conditions, with children performing correctly in the correspondence condition, but at chance in the conflict condition. Together, the results suggest that preschoolers’ causal judgments depend critically on the coexistence of supporting temporal structure.
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