Children extend statistical causal learning to psychological causes, inferring others' desires by 20 months¶

Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study (2 entries) · review r3 · q3
Currency · newest study 2012 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2017: baselines and conditions change

Subclaims¶

q3 i? Children as young as 20 months use statistical Bayesian reasoning to infer another person's desires. → Gopnik 2012 q3 i? Four-year-olds use covariation to infer psychological and biological causes as well as physical ones. → Gopnik 2012 (2)

Evidence¶

Gopnik 2012¶

Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (2012). Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1085-1108. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028044

q3 · i? · review · r3

The review reports Kushnir, Xu and Wellman (2010) as a particularly striking demonstration that statistical Bayesian causal reasoning operates in the psychological domain by 20 months, not only for physical causation.

"Kushnir, Xu & Wellman (2010), found that children as young as 20 months old would use statistical Bayesian reasoning to infer the desires of another person."

Gopnik 2012 (2)¶

Gopnik, A., & Wellman, H. M. (2012). Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory. Psychological Bulletin, 138(6), 1085-1108. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028044

q3 · i? · review · r3

The review attributes to Schulz and Gopnik (2004) the finding that covariation-based causal learning generalizes across physical, psychological and biological domains in 4-year-olds.

"Schulz and Gopnik (2004) found that 4-year-old children used covariation to infer psychological and biological causes as well as physical ones."

Discussion¶

Related Claims¶

• Children aged 2-4 infer causal structure from covariation and use it to design effective interventions — related
• Preschoolers make probabilistic backward-blocking causal inferences, with capacities appearing by 18 months — related
• Four-year-olds infer unobserved hidden causes when observed variables cannot explain the evidence — related
• Children integrate prior knowledge with new statistical evidence in a Bayesian way, overturning initially likely hypotheses — a broader claim this one bears on
• Formalisation of theory offers generative models, counterfactual reasoning, and optimal-performance yardsticks unavailable to verbal accounts — a broader claim this one bears on