Bridging the gap: Causality-at-a-distance in children's categorization and inferences about internal properties

Previous research has shown that preschoolers extend labels and internal properties of objects based on those objects’ causal properties, even when the causal properties conflict with the objects’ perceptual appearance [Nazzi, T., & Gopnik, A. (2000). A shift in children's use of perceptual and causal cues to categorization. Developmental Science, 3, 389–396; Sobel, D. M., Yoachim, C. M., Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Blumenthal, E. J. (2007). The blicket within: Preschoolers’ inferences about insides and causes. Journal of Cognition and Development, 8, 159–182]. These studies, however, only presented causal relations that acted on contact. In two studies, contact causality was replaced by distance causality. In contrast to the contact causality case, 4- and 5-year-olds extended labels to objects with similar perceptual properties over objects with similar causal properties when those properties acted at a distance. When children were asked to make inferences about object's internal properties, they were more likely to make causal responses, with 5-year-olds doing so to a greater extent than 4-year-olds. In a second study, 4-year-olds registered causal properties that acted at a distance and used them to make inferences when no perceptual conflict was present. These results support a hypothesis that young children develop an understanding of the specific mechanisms that link causal relations.     

The development of causal categorization

Two experiments examined the impact of causal relations between features on categorization in 5- to 6-year-old children and adults. Participants learned artificial categories containing instances with causally related features and noncausal features. They then selected the most likely category member from a series of novel test pairs. Classification patterns and logistic regression were used to diagnose the presence of independent effects of causal coherence, causal status, and relational centrality. Adult classification was driven primarily by coherence when causal links were deterministic (Experiment 1) but showed additional influences of causal status when links were probabilistic (Experiment 2). Children's classification was based primarily on causal coherence in both cases. There was no effect of relational centrality in either age group. These results suggest that the generative model (Rehder, 2003a) provides a good account of causal categorization in children as well as adults.     

Core knowledge and its limits: The domain of food

Adults, preschool children, and nonhuman primates detect and categorize food objects according to substance information, conveyed primarily by color and texture. In contrast, they perceive and categorize artifacts primarily by shape and rigidity. The present experiments investigated the origins of this distinction. Using a looking time procedure, Experiment 1 extended previous findings that rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) generalize learning about novel food objects by color over changes in shape. Six additional experiments then investigated whether human infants show the same signature patterns of perception and generalization. Nine-month-old infants failed to detect food objects in accord with their intrinsic properties, in contrast to rhesus monkeys tested in previous research with identical displays. Eight-month-old infants did not privilege substance information over other features when categorizing foods, even though they detected and remembered this information. Moreover, infants showed the same property generalization patterns when presented with foods and tools. The category-specific patterns of perception and categorization shown by human adults, children, and adult monkeys therefore were not found in human infants, providing evidence for limits to infants’ domains of knowledge.     

Causal relations drive young children's induction, naming, and categorization

A number of recent models and experiments have suggested that evidence of early category-based induction is an artifact of perceptual cues provided by experimenters. We tested these accounts against the prediction that different relations (causal versus non-causal) determine the types of perceptual similarity by which children generalize. Young children were asked to label, to infer novel properties, and to project future appearances of a novel animal that varied in two opposite respects: (1) how much it looked like another animal whose name and properties were known, and (2) how much its parents looked like parents of another animal whose name and properties were known. When exemplar origins were known, children generalized to exemplars with similar origins rather than with similar appearances; when origins were unknown, children generalized to exemplars with similar appearances. Results indicate even young children possess the cognitive control to choose the similarities that best predict accurate generalizations.     

When colors backfire: The impact of color cues on moral judgment

This article investigates if and how the valence of color cues affects moral acceptability of (un)desirable consumer behaviors. Study 1 uses colors with definite differences in terms of valence, namely, red and green. Study 2 applies an evaluative conditioning paradigm to endow initially neutral colors with negative versus positive valences. We find an ironic color effect: undesirable behaviors become more acceptable when presented with negatively valenced colors. In general, respondents find (un)desirable behaviors more acceptable when a background color is of the same valence rather than neutral or opposite in valence. Implications for promotion and prevention campaigns are discussed.     

Children’s developing understanding of the relation between variable causal efficacy and mechanistic complexity

Two experiments investigated 3–4-year-olds’ ability to infer the causal mechanisms for a pair of lights. In both experiments the exterior of the two lights appeared identical. In Experiment 1, one light displayed a stable activation pattern of a single color while the other light displayed a variable pattern of activation by cycling through a series of different colors (i.e., a more varied effect). Children were asked to judge which light had a more complex internal structure. Four-year-olds were more likely to match the light with the more variable effect with a more complex internal mechanism and the light with the more stable effect with a less complex mechanism. Three-year-olds’ responses were at chance. Experiment 2 replicated this finding when the activation patterns of the two lights were described verbally but never demonstrated. Taken together, these results suggest that 4-year-olds appreciate that the variability of an object’s causal efficacy is related to the complexity of its internal mechanistic structure.     

Children’s causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers

Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine’s activation that required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds were found. We suggest that children’s causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base rate of certain events occurring. Four-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference.     

Gravity is not the only ruler for falling events: Young children stop making the gravity error after receiving additional perceptual information about the tubes mechanism

Young children seem to operate under the assumption that objects always fall in a straight vertical line. When asked to search for a ball dropped down an S-shaped opaque tube, they repeatedly search directly below. Hood proposed that children have difficulty in inhibiting their prepotent expectation that objects fall in a straight line (Hood, 1995). We asked whether the inability to inhibit this prepotent response is the only factor determining children’s performance on the tubes task. In one condition the openings to the tubes were covered by chimneys, whereas in another condition the openings were visible. When first tested with the apparatus, children performed better when the openings were visible. Furthermore, children’s performance on equally complex configurations (i.e., with or without chimneys) was modulated by their previous experience. Thus, children’s understanding of the tubes mechanism seems to play an important role in addition to inhibitory control.     

Children's Ideas About What Can Really Happen: The Impact of Age and Religious Background

Five- to 11-year-old U.S. children, from either a religious or secular background, judged whether story events could really happen. There were four different types of stories: magical stories violating ordinary causal regularities; religious stories also violating ordinary causal regularities but via a divine agent; unusual stories not violating ordinary causal regularities but with an improbable event; and realistic stories not violating ordinary causal regularities and with no improbable event. Overall, children were less likely to judge that religious and magical stories could really happen than unusual and realistic stories although religious children were more likely than secular children to judge that religious stories could really happen. Irrespective of background, children frequently invoked causal regularities in justifying their judgments. Thus, in justifying their conclusion that a story could really happen, children often invoked a causal regularity, whereas in justifying their conclusion that a story could not really happen, they often pointed to the violation of causal regularity. Overall, the findings show that children appraise the likelihood of story events actually happening in light of their beliefs about causal regularities. A religious upbringing does not impact the frequency with which children invoke causal regularities in judging what can happen, even if it does impact the type of causal factors that children endorse.     

The role of moral commitments in moral judgment

Traditional approaches to moral psychology assumed that moral judgments resulted from the application of explicit commitments, such as those embodied in consequentialist or deontological philosophies. In contrast, recent work suggests that moral judgments often result from unconscious or emotional processes, with explicit commitments generated post hoc. This paper explores the intermediate position that moral commitments mediate moral judgments, but not through their explicit and consistent application in the course of judgment. An experiment with 336 participants finds that individuals vary in the extent to which their moral commitments are consequentialist or deontological, and that this variation is systematically but imperfectly related to the moral judgments elicited by trolley car problems. Consequentialist participants find action in trolley car scenarios more permissible than do deontologists, and only consequentialists moderate their judgments when scenarios that typically elicit different intuitions are presented side by side. The findings emphasize the need for a theory of moral reasoning that can accommodate both the associations and dissociations between moral commitments and moral judgments.     

Changing perspective within and across environments

Perspective change within a single environment is a slow and effortful process. However, little research has addressed perspective change across multiple environments. Using a task-set switching paradigm, subjects judged spatial relationships between target locations from differing perspectives. Response times were longer when successive trials probed different perspectives. However, this cost was greater when perspective was changed within a single environment compared to when it was changed across two environments. This result indicates that the processing of perspective change, and perhaps general spatial reasoning, differs in these two cases. Implications for theories of perspective change and environmental knowledge are discussed.     

When good evidence goes bad: the weak evidence effect in judgment and decision-making

An indispensable principle of rational thought is that positive evidence should increase belief. In this paper, we demonstrate that people routinely violate this principle when predicting an outcome from a weak cause. In Experiment 1 participants given weak positive evidence judged outcomes of public policy initiatives to be less likely than participants given no evidence, even though the evidence was separately judged to be supportive. Experiment 2 ruled out a pragmatic explanation of the result, that the weak evidence implies the absence of stronger evidence. In Experiment 3, weak positive evidence made people less likely to gamble on the outcome of the 2010 United States mid-term Congressional election. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated these findings with everyday causal scenarios. We argue that this “weak evidence effect” arises because people focus disproportionately on the mentioned weak cause and fail to think about alternative causes.     

The Development of Judgment and Decision Making During Childhood and Adolescence

Research on adult judgment and decision making has focused on deviations from normative models, demonstrating biases and reliance on heuristic shortcuts, thus presenting a very different picture than developmental theories that describe a unidirectional progression toward greater logic and efficiency. Recent research related to this apparent contradiction indicates that children develop competencies to reason effectively and make normative decisions, but also develop biased judgment strategies that are used inappropriately in some situations. We suggest potential explanations for the findings, highlighting the need to consider models that incorporate development in both experiential and analytic information processing systems.     

Infants’ reasoning about ambiguous motion events: The role of spatiotemporal and dispositional status information

Two experiments investigate whether 7-month-olds reason about the origin of motion events by considering two sources of causally relevant information: spatiotemporal cues and dispositional status information derived from the identification of an object as either animate (with the enduring causal property of self-initiated motion) or inanimate (requiring an external cause of motion). Infants were shown a ball, a human hand, and an animal engaged in a motion event. While dispositional status information remained constant, spatiotemporal relations varied across conditions. Based on looking time data, we conclude that infants attend flexibly to both types of information. Without spatiotemporal cues, infants rely on dispositional status information. When two objects provide dispositional cues to motion origin, but only one also provides corresponding spatiotemporal information, infants attribute the motion to the object providing both types of information. Given an ambiguous motion event with two dispositional motion originators but no additional spatiotemporal cues, infants may prefer either of the two.     

Adaptive non-interventional heuristics for covariation detection in causal induction: model comparison and rational analysis

In this article, 41 models of covariation detection from 2 × 2 contingency tables were evaluated against past data in the literature and against data from new experiments. A new model was also included based on a limiting case of the normative phi-coefficient under an extreme rarity assumption, which has been shown to be an important factor in covariation detection (McKenzie & Mikkelsen, 2007) and data selection (Hattori, 2002; Oaksford & Chater, 1994, 2003). The results were supportive of the new model. To investigate its explanatory adequacy, a rational analysis using two computer simulations was conducted. These simulations revealed the environmental conditions and the memory restrictions under which the new model best approximates the normative model of covariation detection in these tasks. They thus demonstrated the adaptive rationality of the new model.     

The development of conceptual interests in young children

We conducted a longitudinal analysis of the relative intensity and duration of interests associated with conceptual domains between the ages of 4 and 6 years, respectively. Results indicated a significant portion of preschool children do sustain an interest in conceptual domains during some portion of their childhood. Expected gender differences were found, with boys more likely to express an interest in a conceptual domain than girls. A latent growth curve analysis revealed that the probability of exhibiting a conceptual interest declined as school began, though the rate of that decline was similar for both boys and girls. Potential explanations for the decrease in conceptual interests as school begins are considered.     

Children's reasoning about physics within and across ontological kinds

Reasoning about seven physics principles within and across ontological kinds was examined among 188 5- and 7-year-olds and 59 adults. Individuals in all age groups tended to appropriately generalize what they learned across ontological kinds. However, children also showed sensitivity to ontological kind in their projections: when learning principles with reference to people they were more likely to assume that the principles apply to another person than to an inanimate object, and when learning with reference to an inanimate object they were more likely to assume that the principles apply to another inanimate object than to a person. Five-year-olds, but not 7-year-olds, projected concepts learned about people to a greater extent than principles learned about inanimate objects, closely paralleling the findings of Carey for the biological domain (Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Results from a separate sample of 22 5-year-olds suggest that the primary findings cannot be explained by response perseveration. The present findings indicate that children understand physics principles that apply to both animate and inanimate objects, but distinguish between these ontological kinds.     

Pretense,Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non‐real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future and learn about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in children's play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary.     

Reflection and reasoning in moral judgment

While there is much evidence for the influence of automatic emotional responses on moral judgment, the roles of reflection and reasoning remain uncertain. In Experiment 1, we induced subjects to be more reflective by completing the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) prior to responding to moral dilemmas. This manipulation increased utilitarian responding, as individuals who reflected more on the CRT made more utilitarian judgments. A follow-up study suggested that trait reflectiveness is also associated with increased utilitarian judgment. In Experiment 2, subjects considered a scenario involving incest between consenting adult siblings, a scenario known for eliciting emotionally driven condemnation that resists reasoned persuasion. Here, we manipulated two factors related to moral reasoning: argument strength and deliberation time. These factors interacted in a manner consistent with moral reasoning: A strong argument defending the incestuous behavior was more persuasive than a weak argument, but only when increased deliberation time encouraged subjects to reflect.     

相似性判断和差异性判断的不对称性及其机制探索

本文阐述了相似性判断和差异性判断不对称性的相关研究。首先介绍了不对称性的发展及理论解释。其次,根据事件相关电位的研究结果,阐述了图-词信息的双编码模型对相似性判断的影响。接着分析和介绍了相似性判断的双编码过程及其时间进程。最后,作者提出有待深入研究的几个问题：（1）差异性策略在分类和推理中的应用;（2）相似性双编码过程的实证研究及其应用;（3）从发展认知神经科学的角度探讨不对称的认知神经机制。