Click here to read about recent projects in our 2008-2009 Newsletter.
Below is a sample of projects currently underway in the lab. If you and your child participate, they might participate in one or more of these games, or in others related to children’s causal reasoning and knowledge of other people’s minds.
Children’s Knowledge of Causal Mechanisms
A large part of our research involves figuring out what children know about cause and effect in the world. Recently, we’ve been studying this question in terms of what children know about mechanisms – how causal relations work, and why we should expect to see a causal relation in some cases (like when you push an elevator button and the elevator comes) and not in other cases (like when you push an elevator button and someone across the lobby calls your name).
We take two approaches. One approach looks at children’s broad concept of “mechanism” – when do children recognize that a causal relation between two events has to have a mechanism? The other is more specific – looking at how children understand the different mechanisms involved in causal relations across different domains (e.g., the physical world vs. social relations) or within one (sometimes quite narrow) area (e.g., wired vs. wireless connections of a computer).
Usually, to play these games, we show children a novel machine or setting in which they learn about a new kind of causal relation among events. We usually allow them to play in this environment (or watch someone else play with it), and then ask questions about what’s going on.
Children’s Understanding of Expertise
The world is filled with causal knowledge that children have to learn. Some of that knowledge is learned from observation and interaction with the world (e.g., that unsupported objects fall, or that objects can’t pass through one another). But other information has to be communicated to you (e.g., that you have to wash your hands to get rid of germs). We don’t see germs – we know they’re there because other people have told us.
Most of the research in this line looks at how children learn from other people – particularly when one person is a more reliable source of knowledge than the other. But, we also study the limits of reliability – particularly, how children integrate a person’s history of reliability with the relevance of that knowledge. The basic principle is this: we might rely on a plumber to fix the toilet in our house, and we might concede that a good plumber would also know about a related topic, like a heating system. But, our decision to rely on the plumber’s political beliefs depends on how well we think the plumber represents our own beliefs. It’s this last part that particularly important – do children think that an expert in one area is an expert in all areas or domains of knowledge? We think the answer is no, and that children integrate an individual’s reliability with the relevance of that information. The trick is defining relevance, which is what many of our experiments are about.
To play these games, we usually introduce children to two confederates, and establish that one is a more reliable source of information than another. We then ask the children questions about what they think these people know.
Children’s Numerical Knowledge
Infants understand a lot about numbers. But most of that knowledge is based on what they directly observe. We’ve been studying when children understand that numbers are themselves concepts, and are interrelated to one another. Children don’t understand this early on – it takes a while for this to develop. But what we’re really interested in is whether this understanding relates to children’s developing mathematical abilities.
We have a battery of tasks designed to test this out, and we’ve found that there is indeed a relation. What we’re working on now is the effects of this relationship. Do these children do better at mathematical tasks in school? Can we teach children math and numerical concepts earlier? The ultimate goal here is to develop an educational intervention with these aims in mind.
Infants’ Causal Knowledge
Most of our work on causal knowledge is on preschoolers, but we don’t think that an understanding of cause and effect begins at age 3. Rather, we suspect that infants have it very early in development. We’ve recently been investigating causal reasoning abilities in toddlers – looking to see whether their reasoning abilities differ from or are the same as preschoolers. We’ve mostly found similarities, but of course it depends on how we ask the questions.
Our newest projects are actually on even younger children – we’ve begun to design experiments looking at whether infants in the first year of life have the same causal reasoning abilities as our toddlers and preschoolers. Some of these games involve showing children movies and examining how they look at them (using an eyetracker). Other games are more behavioral in nature, and involve showing the infants a set of events and watching how they respond to them. In both cases, the overall goal is to investigate when causal concepts emerge and what the extent of infants’ causal reasoning abilities are.
