Causal intervention strategies change across adolescence

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that confirm single hypotheses rather than those that discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative intervention decisions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. We found that the use of discriminatory strategies increased through adolescence and plateaued into adulthood. Our results identify a clear developmental trend in causal reasoning, and highlight the need to expand research on causal learning mechanisms in adolescence.

[1]  Geraint Rees,et al.  The development of metacognitive ability in adolescence , 2013, Consciousness and Cognition.

[2]  S. Denison,et al.  Probabilistic models, learning algorithms, and response variability: sampling in cognitive development , 2014, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[3]  B. Rehder,et al.  Strategies to intervene on causal systems are adaptively selected , 2015, Cognitive Psychology.

[4]  Caren A. Frosch,et al.  Children's use of interventions to learn causal structure. , 2016, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[5]  R. Nickerson.  Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises , 1998 .

[6]  G. Glover,et al.  The Medial Prefrontal Cortex and the Emergence of Self-Conscious Emotion in Adolescence , 2013, Psychological science.

[7]  Morton Rieber.  Hypothesis testing in children as a function of age. , 1969 .

[8]  Dylan A. Simon,et al.  Model-based choices involve prospective neural activity , 2015, Nature Neuroscience.

[9]  Catherine A. Hartley,et al.  From Creatures of Habit to Goal-Directed Learners , 2016, Psychological science.

[10]  Andrew Gelman,et al.  General methods for monitoring convergence of iterative simulations , 1998 .

[11]  C. C. Spiker,et al.  Advances in Child Development and Behavior , 1967 .

[12]  Thomas L. Griffiths,et al.  Seeking Confirmation Is Rational for Deterministic Hypotheses , 2011, Cogn. Sci..

[13]  Fei Xu,et al.  Children's Causal Interventions Combine Discrimination and Confirmation , 2018, CogSci.

[14]  A. Gopnik.  Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications , 2012, Science.

[15]  Neil R. Bramley,et al.  Conservative forgetful scholars: How people learn causal structure through sequences of interventions. , 2015, Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition.

[16]  Deanna Kuhn,et al.  Can Engaging in Science Practices Promote Deep Understanding of Them , 2017 .

[17]  Todd M. Gureckis,et al.  Are Biases When Making Causal Interventions Related to Biases in Belief Updating? , 2015, CogSci.

[18]  Jessica A. Sommerville,et al.  The Importance of Discovery in Children's Causal Learning from Interventions , 2010, Front. Psychology.

[19]  Daphne Koller,et al.  Active Learning for Structure in Bayesian Networks , 2001, IJCAI.

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

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

[22]  Christopher G. Lucas,et al.  Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood , 2017, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[23]  S. Sloman,et al.  Causality in thought. , 2015, Annual review of psychology.

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