The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes.
نویسندگان
چکیده
Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2, 4-year-olds made inferences from an object's internal parts to its causal properties without being given verbal labels for objects or being shown that insides and causal properties covaried. Experiment 3 found that 4-year-olds chose an object with the same internal part over one with the same external property when asked which object had the same causal property as the target (which had both the internal part and external property). Finally, Experiment 4 demonstrated that 4-year-olds made similar inferences from causal properties to internal parts, but 3-year-olds relied more on objects' external perceptual appearance. These results suggest that by the age of 4, children have developed an understanding of a relation between an artifact's internal parts and its causal properties.
منابع مشابه
Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers
Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played...
متن کاملThe good, the strong, and the accurate: preschoolers' evaluations of informant attributes.
Much recent evidence shows that preschoolers are sensitive to the accuracy of an informant. Faced with two informants, one of whom names familiar objects accurately and the other inaccurately, preschoolers subsequently prefer to learn the names and functions of unfamiliar objects from the more accurate informant. This study examined the inference process underlying this preference. We asked whe...
متن کاملGod does not play dice: causal determinism and preschoolers' causal inferences.
Three studies investigated children's belief in causal determinism. If children are determinists, they should infer unobserved causes whenever observed causes appear to act stochastically. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds saw a stochastic generative cause and inferred the existence of an unobserved inhibitory cause. Children traded off inferences about the presence of unobserved inhibitory causes a...
متن کاملPreschoolers infer contrast from adjectives if they can access lexical alternatives
When speakers use modified noun phrases (e.g. “the long book”), they provide information not only about a salient feature of a single item (that this book is long), but also about implicit contrasts with possible alternatives (books can vary by length: some may be short). We investigate the development of preschoolers’ ability to detect implicit contrasts from speakers’ use of adjectives and ma...
متن کاملWhen Mr. Blicket Wants It, Children are Bayesian
Sobel, Tenenbaum, and Gopnik (2004) demonstrated that 4year-olds’ but not 3-year-olds’ causal inferences were welldescribed by a Bayesian mechanism that relies on specific causal knowledge. Sobel et al. (submitted) demonstrated that this causal knowledge developed between ages 3-4, suggesting that if 3-year-olds had access to this knowledge, their inferences could also be described by this Baye...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
برای دانلود متن کامل این مقاله و بیش از 32 میلیون مقاله دیگر ابتدا ثبت نام کنید
ثبت ناماگر عضو سایت هستید لطفا وارد حساب کاربری خود شوید
ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- Journal of cognition and development : official journal of the Cognitive Development Society
دوره 8 2 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2007