Children's Causal Learning and Developing Knowledge of Mechanisms

世界上充满了因果知识，孩子们必须去发现。虽然毫无疑问，儿童以惊人的能力学习物理、心理和生物知识，但对于儿童如何表达这些因果知识或学习新的因果关系，人们的理解却很有限。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，大卫·索贝尔（David Sobel）博士研究了一种观点，即一个特定的计算框架可以作为表征和学习因果知识的模型。本研究的初步调查表明，学龄前儿童根据该模型的前提进行因果推理。索贝尔博士试图将这些发现推广到幼儿和婴儿身上。这将证明儿童从很小的时候就拥有复杂的因果推理能力，并将描绘出儿童如何表达他们的因果知识的描述。索贝尔博士还提出了一种描述因果学习如何发生的特殊算法。他将研究儿童在学习物理和心理知识时使用该算法的情况。这将证明为什么因果学习能力在婴儿和学龄前时期存在特殊的发展差异。最近的许多研究和当代思想表明，儿童在构建环境知识方面起着积极的作用。孩子们究竟是如何做到这一点的仍然是个谜。了解儿童如何表现和学习因果知识应该使研究人员能够确定如何促进这种学习。这将使我们能够设计更好的教育干预措施，特别是科学教育。了解环境因素如何促进因果学习将有助于了解如何减少负面因素。这可以防止儿童在生命早期成为有风险的学习者。最后，许多发育障碍被诊断为儿童缺乏特定的因果推理能力（如自闭症的心理学知识）。了解儿童是如何获得这种因果知识的，或许能让我们确定为什么自闭症儿童（以及其他高危人群）没有获得这种认知能力。

The world is full of causal knowledge that children must discover. While there is little doubt that children learn physical, psychological, and biological knowledge at an amazing capacity, there is only a modest understanding of how children represent this causal knowledge or learn new causal relations. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. David Sobel examines the idea that a particular computational framework serves as a model for representing and learning causal knowledge. Preliminary investigations for this study have demonstrated that preschoolers engage in causal inferences according to the premises of this model. Dr. Sobel seeks to extend these findings to toddlers and infants. This would demonstrate that children possess sophisticated causal reasoning abilities from very early ages and would map out a description of how children represent their causal knowledge. Dr. Sobel also suggests a particular algorithm that describes how causal learning takes place. He will investigate children's use of this algorithm when learning both physical and psychological knowledge. This would demonstrate why particular developmental differences in causal learning abilities are present during the infant and preschool years.Much recent research and contemporary thinking suggests that children take an active role in constructing knowledge of their environment. Exactly how children do this is still a mystery. Understanding how children represent and learn causal knowledge should enable researchers to determine how to promote such learning. This would allow us to design better interventions for education, particularly for science education. Understanding how environmental factors contribute to causal learning would shed insight into how negative factors could be reduced. This could prevent children from becoming at-risk learners early in life. Finally, many developmental disorders have been diagnosed by citing that children lack particular causal reasoning abilities (such as psychological knowledge in the case of autism). Understanding how children acquire such causal knowledge might enable us to determine why children with autism (and other at-risk populations) do not acquire such cognitive abilities.