| Abstract: | In making causal inferences, children must both identify a causal problem and selectively attend to meaningful evidence. Four experiments demonstrate that verbally framing an event (“Which animals make Lion laugh?”) helps 4-year-olds extract evidence from a complex scene to make accurate causal inferences. Whereas framing was unnecessary when evidence was isolated, children required it to extract and reason about evidence embedded in a more complex scene. Subtler framing stating the causal problem, but not highlighting the relevant variables, was equally effective. Simply making the causal relationship more perceptually obvious did facilitate children's inferences, but not to the level of verbal framing. These results illustrate how children's causal reasoning relies on scaffolding from adults. |
