The Influence of Additivity Training on Cue Competition Effects in Children's Causal Learning
نویسندگان
چکیده
The inferential reasoning account of causal learning holds that effortful reasoning processes underpin causal judgments. Evidence for this account comes from demonstrations that performance on cue competition tasks is affected by pretraining showing causal cues to be additive in their effects. If inferential reasoning underpins the additivity effect, then we might expect this effect to emerge developmentally. The current study provided 172 children (4-5-year-olds and 6-7year-olds) with either additive or non-additive pre-training, involving a new child-friendly version of the ’allergy’ paradigm previously used to investigate cue competition effects in adults. We observed an effect of pre-training and age on causal judgments, with a significant effect of additivity training only in the older age group. These results are consistent with an inferential reasoning account of additivity and cue competition effects, and suggest that the ability to engage in the necessary inferential reasoning emerges developmentally.
منابع مشابه
Additivity pretraining and cue competition effects: developmental evidence for a reasoning-based account of causal learning.
The effect of additivity pretraining on blocking has been taken as evidence for a reasoning account of human and animal causal learning. If inferential reasoning underpins this effect, then developmental differences in the magnitude of this effect in children would be expected. Experiment 1 examined cue competition effects in children's (4- to 5-year-olds and 6- to 7-year-olds) causal learning ...
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