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Child-led play supports parents to make flexible and exploratory causal inferences

Sat, March 23, 8:00 to 9:30am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 343

Integrative Statement

Prior research has demonstrated that children are better than adults at learning certain unconventional causal forms, suggesting that hypothesis search in early development is more flexible and eclectic than adults (Gopnik et al. 2017). Specifically, young children are more likely to consider unconventional conjunctive (”AND”) causal relationships (i.e., multiple causes jointly produce an effect) than adults (Lucas et al., 2014; Wente et al., 2017). Do children draw flexible causal inferences in their explorations and does it promote more creative and flexible thinking in causal learning for observing adults? We first explored the difference between children and parents in exploration of objects with unusual conjunctive causal properties. We also examined the impact of observing other’s exploration (either participant’s parent or child) on self-generated causal-learning performance.

Fifty-seven parent-child dyads (Children: N = 72, 53% Female, M = 5.03, SD = 0.84, Range = 4.0-6.9 years; Parents: N = 72, 56% Mothers) played an interactive video game involving a machine and objects. During training, a parent-child dyad saw an experimenter demonstrate events that were statistically best explained by the unusual conjunctive relationship. That is, the machine was activated by some combinations of objects but not by each of the objects individually. The experimenter then introduced a new set of objects and asked the parent-child pair to explore the objects by (1) parent and child independently (Alone), (2) child with parent watching (Child-Led), or (3) parent explored with child watching (Parent-Led). Next, the experimenter asked the parent and child to individually generate the effect using the objects (i.e., “Which of these objects would you use to turn on the machine?). To measure parents’ and children’s openness to consider the unfamiliar causal form, we coded whether two or more objects were used during the exploration trials and the final intervention.

Overall, children outperformed parents in generalizing the unusual conjunctive relationship to their exploration and learning: Children were more likely than adults to explore objects jointly [Welch t(90.5)= 3.19, p = .001] and use multiple objects to activate the machine [χ2(1) = 22.77, p < .001]. Compared to children, parents tried more deconfounding causal explorations [t(72.9)= -2.36, p = .021] and showed a lower probability of using multiple objects to activate the machine [t(88.9)= 1.83, p = .070]. Critically, parents in the Child-Led group were more likely to use multiple objects to activate the machine than those in the Parent-Led group [χ2(1) = 5.49, p = .019], suggesting that observing evidence generated by children helped parents to be more flexible and exploratory in their own causal inferences.

Consistent with previous research, children were better than parents at learning the unusual conjunctive relationship, suggesting that children make more flexible causal inferences than adults. Our research revealed that children’s broad, exploratory hypotheses were also reflected on their explorations. Furthermore, our findings suggest that observing children’s explorations help parents to be more flexible and open-minded in their causal learning. Future work will explore whether child-yoked interventions performed by adults similarly improves adults’ flexibility in causal form inferences.

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