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Toddlers' understanding of prediction, intervention, and means of transmission: When psychological outcomes are easier than physical ones

Toddlers’ understanding of prediction, intervention, and means of transmission: When psychological outcomes are easier than physical ones Paul Muentener (pmuenten@mit.edu), Daniel Friel, & Laura Schulz Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02138 USA Abstract early childhood, children’s causal reasoning may be restricted to such contexts. Specifically, Bonawitz et. al (2010) showed toddlers several trials of predictive relations in which a block began moving spontaneously towards, and contacted, a base, after which a toy airplane connected to the base immediately began to spin. For adults, evidence that event A predicts event B suggests the possibility that intervening on A might generate B (i.e., intervening on A to see if B occurs is a good way to learn whether the relationship is genuinely causal). However, although both four-year-olds and toddlers readily learned the predictive relationship, only four-year- olds spontaneously pushed the block into the toy and anticipated the outcome (i.e., looked predictively towards the toy). Toddlers succeeded only in restricted contexts, in particular when the events were initiated by dispositional agents. 2 One possibility is that although toddlers recognize predictive relations and are capable of learning the relationship between their own interventions and outcomes they do not bind these two kinds of reasoning into a single, adult-like concept “cause”. Indeed, many researchers have proposed that adult humans may be unique in integrating the kind of predictive reasoning involved in classical conditioning with the ability to anticipate the outcome of interventions characterized by operant learning (Gopnik et al., 2004; Tomasello & Call, 1997; Woodward, 2007). Although animals can make different predictions under observation and intervention (Blaisdell, Sawa, Leising, & Waldmann, 2006), there is no evidence that animals spontaneously design novel interventions after learning predictive relations. Arguably, this ability develops relatively late, even in human ontogeny. Alternatively, toddlers might have an adult-like concept of causation but fail to token many physical event sequences as potential causal relationships. Several findings suggest that children develop an expectation of “causation-on- contact” very early. Research has shown that infants expect objects to move or change state on contact (Ball, 1973; Muentener & Carey, 2010; Kotovsky & Baillargeon, 2000; Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009) and this expectation persists through early childhood; although four-year-olds can learn to accept causation-at-a-distance, they too initially Adults recognize that if event A predicts event B, intervening on A might generate B. Research suggests that although preschoolers draw this inference much like adults, toddlers do not (Bonawitz et. al, 2010). Here we look at whether toddlers’ failure is domain-general (i.e., they lack an adult- like concept of causality that integrates prediction, intervention, and agency) or domain-specific (i.e., toddlers have trouble recognizing some physical processes as causal but might succeed with psychological events). We showed toddlers (24 months) a block moving into a base, after which an effect occurred; we then gave children the block and asked them to generate the effect. Toddlers performed the intervention and predicted the outcome when the effect was psychological (a puppet laughing) but, replicating previous studies, not when the effect was physical (a toy activating). Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to the relative saliency of the psychological effect. Keywords: causal reasoning; domain-specific; domain- general; physical causality; psychological causality; prediction; intervention. Causal representations are central to human cognition. They support prediction, explanation, and intervention and underlie folk theories across domains (Carey, 1985; Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997; Wellman & Gelman, 1992). Moreover, causal representations cross-cut conceptual boundaries. Adults are equally adept at reasoning about causal events in the physical domain (e.g., driving a car) and psychological domains (e.g., making someone laugh). Considerable research testifies to the sophistication of causal inferences even early in development. Children can distinguish spurious associations from genuine causes, reason about unobserved variables, and use the conditional dependence of interventions and outcomes to distinguish a range of causal structures (e.g., Bullock, Gelman, & Baillargeon, 1982; Gopnik & Sobel, 2000; Gopnik et al., 2004; Kushnir & Gopnik, 2007; Schulz, Goodman, Tenenbaum, & Jenkins, 2008; Schulz & Sommerville, 2006; Shultz, 1982; Sobel & Kirkham, 2006; Williamson, Meltzoff, & Markman, 2008.) Critically however, studies of causal reasoning tend to investigate children’s inferences in the context of an agent’s goal-directed actions: children are almost uniformly asked to reason about events initiated by people or puppets. 1 Recent research suggests that in very One might worry that toddlers failed to intervene simply because they were troubled by the spontaneous movement of the block. Control conditions in the earlier study (Bonawitz, et al., 2010) ruled out this possibility. In particular children succeeded with spontaneously moving blocks as long as there were other cues that the events were causal (i.e., causal language). Investigations of Michottian causality (Michotte, 1963) are an important exception to this claim; however, Michottean causality is arguably a modular process, divorced from causal knowledge more broadly (Scholl & Tremoulet, 2000; Woodward, in press; though see Saxe & Carey, 2006, and Schlottmann, 2000)