Children's counterfactual inferences about long and short causal chains
Children's counterfactual inferences about long and short causal chains
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DOI：
10.1111/1467-7687.00309
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发表时间：
2003-11-01
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Nichols, S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
German, TP;Nichols, S
最近关于儿童反事实推理的研究结果表明，儿童在“心智理论”领域的发展能力可能反映了学龄前时期反事实思维能力的出现（例如Riggs， Peterson, Robinson & Mitchell, 1998）。在这里报道的研究中，研究人员向一组3岁和4岁的儿童展示了描述几个事件因果链的故事，并要求他们完成反事实思维任务，其中涉及到链条中不同点的变化。得出成功的反事实推理的能力在很大程度上取决于问题的推理长度和孩子的年龄；虽然3岁的孩子在短推理反事实题上的表现高于随机，但他们在涉及较长推理链的问题上的表现低于随机。四岁的孩子在所有问题上都是绝对正确的。此外，我们还发现，虽然长链推理问题的成功与通过标准错误信念测试的能力显著相关，但短链推理问题没有这种关系，短链推理问题明显比错误信念问题更容易。这些结果从因果知识、反事实思维和心理状态内容计算三者之间的发展关系的角度进行了讨论。
Recent findings on counterfactual reasoning in children have led to the claim that children's developing capacities in the domain of `theory of mind' might reflect the emergence of the ability to engage in counterfactual thinking over the preschool period (e.g Riggs, Peterson, Robinson & Mitchell, 1998). In the study reported here, groups of 3- and 4-year old children were presented with stories describing causal chains of several events, and asked counterfactual thinking tasks involving changes to different points in the chain. The ability to draw successful counterfactual inferences depended strongly on the inferential length of the problem, and the age of the children; while 3-year-olds performed above chance on short inference counterfactuals, they performed below chance on problems involving longer inference chains. Four-year-old children were above chance on all problems. Moreover, it was found that while success on longer chain inference problems was significantly correlated with the ability to pass tests of standard false belief, there was no such relationship for short inference problems, which were significantly easier than false belief problems. These results are discussed in terms of the developmental relationships between causal knowledge, counterfactual thinking and calculating the contents of mental states.