The influence of developing social cognition on causal learning in the preschool years

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The preschool years are characterized by extraordinary changes in children's causal knowledge; 3- and 4-year-olds have increasingly coherent theories about the way things work, they can reason about hidden causal forces like gravity or germs, and they can rapidly learn causal relations from new evidence. These changes are accompanied by equally remarkable developments in social knowledge -- the understanding of the motivations, emotions, and mental states that drive human behavior. Intuitively, it seems clear that what children know about people can have consequences for what children learn from people. Indeed, studies have shown that, where social information is critical (such as in learning about language or culture), children's social knowledge influences how and what they can learn. However, causal learning doesn't necessarily require social information; children can learn about causal relations from associations between events, or by simply observing the consequences of actions. Thus, children's developing social cognition may have unique and importantly different implications for causal learning than for social learning. To date, these implications have been largely unexplored. This project investigates the influence of preschoolers' developing social knowledge on their causal learning. Specifically, it focuses on their developing understanding of epistemic states -- that some people know more than others, and that people may have different areas of expertise and ability. The first four studies use lab-based experimental methods to address (1) whether, as in other learning domains, preschoolers are sensitive to others' past accuracy in causal learning; (2) whether, in contrast to other learning domains, preschoolers show selective trust of others depending on the type of knowledge and expertise they have; (3) how epistemic information (i.e., that one person knows more than another) interacts with statistical information (i.e., a strong vs. weak correlation) in causal learning; and (4) how epistemic information interacts with information from children's own active causal exploration. All four studies include measures to investigate how developmental and individual differences in social cognition contribute to the process of causal learning. Finally, a fifth classroom-based study combines experimental with observational methods to investigate how preschoolers actively engage with social sources in the process of exploratory causal play. There is a trend in early childhood education toward increasing direct instruction, thus more emphasis on social transmission in early learning. Research is needed to better enable us to evaluate this trend. To this aim, the results of this research will have implications for both our understanding of basic learning processes in children and our ability to design effective educational environments for them. The results will also deepen our understanding of the unique processes that characterize early casual learning (the foundation for later science education) and distinguish it from learning in other domains. The final classroom-based study explicitly creates a link between basic research and early childhood education, and is expected to lead to further research targeting this link.