Poster #17 - Impact of failure on 3- to 6-year-old children’s mechanistic causal reasoning

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Introduction: A complete causal understanding of a system involves identifying not only the actions required to bring about an effect but also the mechanisms (e.g., switches, electricity) that support causal action-outcome relations. Research has shown that children update their beliefs when familiar mechanisms are manipulated (e.g, disconnecting wires should change outcomes) and make judgments about hidden mechanisms in some contexts (e.g., Sobel & Buchanan, 2011; Schulz & Somerville, 2006). Less is known about the contexts that support children’s spontaneous mechanistic reasoning or how mechanistic reasoning changes across development. Given prior findings that school-aged children learn more about mechanisms when they naturally experience failure (Willard et al., 2019) and that preschoolers explore more when causal relations are ambiguous (Schulz & Bonawitz, 2007), we investigated how failure influences children’s mechanistic reasoning. We predicted that failure would support 3- to 6-year-old children’s (n = 71) exploration, learning, and generalization about causal mechanisms.

Method: The study had four phases: Demonstration, Exploration, Explanation, and Generalization. During Demonstration we showed children an unfamiliar toy, gave them basic instructions about how to make it work, but did not tell them about a hidden mechanism (a switch that needed to be ‘on’ to make it work). During Exploration, children were given the toy to freely explore. Between conditions, we manipulated children’s success in making the toy work (Success Condition: switch ON, n = 34/condition); Failure Condition: switch OFF, n = 37/condition). We measured children’s exploration time and whether they found the hidden switch. During Explanation we asked children to tell us how the toy worked to elicit mechanistic causal explanations. During Generalization we gave children a novel toy with a similar hidden mechanism and asked them to help us figure out how it worked. We measured whether children interacted with and spoke about the mechanism. Overall, we predicted that children in the Failure condition would be more likely to discover and talk about causal mechanisms, as well as generalize these behaviors to new toys.

Results: Children in the Failure condition were more likely to find the mechanism (χ2(1,65) = 16.41, p < 0.01; Figure 1) and more likely to reference the mechanism in their explanations (χ2(1,65) = 7.540, p = 0.01; Figure 2) than children in the Success condition. Older children were also more likely to find the mechanism (χ2(1,65) = 5.51, p = 0.02), but were no more likely to reference the mechanism in their explanations (χ2(1,65) = 0.306, p = 0.58). In contrast, during Generalization, although children in the Failure condition were more likely to discover the mechanism (χ2(1,65) = 3.87, p = 0.05), they were not more likely to reference the mechanism in their explanations (χ2(1,65) = 0.857, p = 0.36).

Discussion: These findings suggest that contexts of failure support preschoolers’ mechanistic exploration and learning, behaviors which increase with age. Further research should investigate how children generalize their mechanistic knowledge to new learning contexts.

Authors

• Gauri Harindranath, Tufts University
  Presenting Author

• Paul Muentener, Tufts University