Just do it? Investigating the gap between prediction and action in toddlers' causal inferences
Name
Saxe-2010-Just do it.pdf
Size
282.83 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
6161c76b9a5fef20991d090db59c48ee
Author(s)
Bonawitz, Elizabeth
Saxe, Rebecca R.
Gopnik, Alison
Meltzoff, Andrew N.
Woodward, James
Schulz, Laura E.
Ferranti, Darlene
Date Issued
December 2010
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Bonawitz, Elizabeth Baraff et al. “Just Do It? Investigating the Gap Between Prediction and Action in Toddlers’ Causal Inferences.” Cognition 115.1 (2010): 104–117. Web. 13 Apr. 2012. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Adults’ causal representations integrate information about predictive relations and the possibility of effective intervention; if one event reliably predicts another, adults can represent the possibility that acting to bring about the first event might generate the second. Here we show that although toddlers (mean age: 24 months) readily learn predictive relationships between physically connected events, they do not spontaneously initiate one event to try to generate the second (although older children, mean age: 47 months, do; Experiments 1 and 2). Toddlers succeed only when the events are initiated by a dispositional agent (Experiment 3), when the events involve direct contact between objects (Experiment 4), or when the events are described using causal language (Experiment 5). This suggests that causal language may help children extend their initial causal representations beyond agent-initiated and direct contact events.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.12.001
