Constraints on Hypothesis Selection in Causal Learning

How do children identify promising hypotheses worth testing? Many studies have shown that preschoolers can use patterns of covariation together with prior knowledge to learn causal relationships. However, covariation data are not always available and myriad hypotheses may be commensurate with substantive knowledge about content domains. We propose that children can identify high-level abstract features common to effects and their candidate causes and use these to guide their search. We investigate children’s sensitivity to two such high-level features — proportion and dynamics, and show that preschoolers can use these to link effects and candidate causes, even in the absence of other disambiguating information.

[1]  D. Gentner.  Children's Performance on a Spatial Analogies Task. , 1977 .

[2]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Analogical problem solving , 1980, Cognitive Psychology.

[3]  David J. Lewkowicz,et al.  Cross-modal equivalence in early infancy: Auditory–visual intensity matching. , 1980 .

[4]  D. Medin,et al.  The role of theories in conceptual coherence. , 1985, Psychological review.

[5]  S. Carey.  Conceptual Change in Childhood , 1985 .

[6]  Herbert A. Simon,et al.  Scientific discovery: compulalional explorations of the creative process , 1987 .

[7]  D. Gentner,et al.  Structure mapping in analogy and similarity. , 1997 .

[8]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Words, thoughts, and theories , 1997 .

[9]  David M. Sobel,et al.  A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. , 2004, Psychological review.

[10]  L. Schulz,et al.  Serious fun: preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded. , 2007, Developmental psychology.

[11]  Fei Xu,et al.  Intuitive statistics by 8-month-old infants , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[12]  Noah D. Goodman,et al.  Going beyond the evidence: Abstract laws and preschoolers’ responses to anomalous data , 2008, Cognition.

[13]  S. Denison,et al.  Statistical inference and sensitivity to sampling in 11-month-old infants , 2009, Cognition.

[14]  D. Gentner,et al.  Where Hypotheses Come From: Learning New Relations by Structural Alignment , 2010 .

[15]  S. Denison,et al.  Twelve- to 14-month-old infants can predict single-event probability with large set sizes. , 2010, Developmental science.

[16]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  Infants consider both the sample and the sampling process in inductive generalization , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[17]  Charles Kemp,et al.  How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction , 2011, Science.

[18]  C. Spence.  Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review , 2011, Attention, perception & psychophysics.

[19]  Noah D. Goodman,et al.  Where science starts: Spontaneous experiments in preschoolers’ exploratory play , 2011, Cognition.

[20]  L. Schulz.  Finding new facts; thinking new thoughts. , 2012, Advances in child development and behavior.

[21]  L. Schulz.  The origins of inquiry: inductive inference and exploration in early childhood , 2012, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[22]  L. Schulz,et al.  Children balance theories and evidence in exploration, explanation, and learning , 2012, Cognitive Psychology.

[23]  A. Gopnik,et al.  Reconstructing constructivism: causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. , 2012, Psychological bulletin.

[24]  Jonathan D. Nelson,et al.  Children’s sequential information search is sensitive to environmental probabilities , 2014, Cognition.

[25]  L. Schulz,et al.  Imagination and the generation of new ideas , 2015 .

[26]  M. Raijmakers,et al.  Preschoolers perform more informative experiments after observing theory-violating evidence. , 2015, Journal of experimental child psychology.