Toddlers infer unobserved causes for spontaneous events
Name
Muentener-2014-Toddlers infer unobs.pdf
Size
1.38 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ce3269eb98a2155de97411e8884939c6
Author(s)
Muentener, Paul Jason
Schulz, Laura E.
Date Issued
December 2014
Journal
Frontiers in Psychology
Publisher
Frontiers Research Foundation
Citation
Muentener, Paul, and Laura Schulz. “Toddlers Infer Unobserved Causes for Spontaneous Events.” Front. Psychol. 5 (December 23, 2014).
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Previous research suggests that children infer the presence of unobserved causes when objects appear to move spontaneously. Are such inferences limited to motion events or do children assume that unexplained physical events have causes more generally? Here we introduce an apparently spontaneous event and ask whether, even in the absence of spatiotemporal and co-variation cues linking the events, toddlers treat a plausible variable as a cause of the event. Toddlers (24 months) saw a toy that appeared to light up either spontaneously or after an experimenter’s action. Toddlers were also introduced to a button but were not shown any predictive relation between the button and the light. Across three different dependent measures of exploration, predictive looking (Study 1), prompted intervention (Study 2), and spontaneous exploration (Study 3), toddlers were more likely to represent the button as a cause of the light when the event appeared to occur spontaneously. In Study 4, we found that even in the absence of a plausible candidate cause, toddlers engaged in selective exploration when the light appeared to activate spontaneously. These results suggest that toddlers’ exploration is guided by the causal explanatory power of events.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01496
