Causal Information-Seeking Strategies Change Across Development

• In Event: Active Learning Across Domains and Development: How Goals and Experience Shape Children’s Pursuit of Information

Abstract

Introduction. Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Though the majority of developmental causal learning research has focused on preschool-aged children, selecting informative interventions may require multiple cognitive processes that continue to develop into adolescence including model-based decision making, proactive cognitive control, and metacognitive monitoring of the efficacy of one’s actions. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across childhood and adolescence, and into early adulthood, using an adapted version of a task originally introduced in Coenen et al. (2015).

Hypotheses. We hypothesized that improvements in causal information-seeking strategies would extend into adolescence and be supported by improvements in metacognitive monitoring.

Method. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each puzzle comprised a three- or four-node computer chip with hidden wires connecting the nodes. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip’s hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures.

Results. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. In addition, though we did not provide trial-by-trial feedback, participants across our age range increased their use of discriminatory interventions in the second half relative to the first half of trials, suggesting that they learned to implement a more effective intervention strategy over the course of the task (Figure 1). Improvements in intervention strategy both over the course of development and within the task itself were related to participants’ ability to accurately judge the strength of discriminatory evidence elicited by their interventions, as indexed by their confidence in their selections. Participants who could best judge the quality of evidence elicited by their interventions demonstrated a greater use of a discriminatory intervention strategy overall and greater increases in discriminatory strategy use from the first to the second half of the experiment.

Conclusions. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information-seeking may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing hypotheses. Further, they suggest that causal learning and decision-making continue to change throughout late childhood and adolescence and highlight the need for their further investigation in this key developmental period.

Authors

• Kate Nussenbaum, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Alexandra O Cohen, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Zachary Davis, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• David Halpern, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Todd Gureckis, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Catherine Hartley, Weill Cornell Medicine
  Non-Presenting Author