The influence of developing social cognition on causal learning in the preschool years

学龄前社会认知发展对因果学习的影响

• 批准号: 1023179
• 负责人: Tamar Kushnir
• 金额: $ 31.89万
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2014-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1023179&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: influence; developing; social; cognition; causal

The preschool years are characterized by extraordinary changes in children's causal knowledge; 3- and 4-year-olds have increasingly coherent theories about the way things work, they can reason about hidden causal forces like gravity or germs, and they can rapidly learn causal relations from new evidence. These changes are accompanied by equally remarkable developments in social knowledge -- the understanding of the motivations, emotions, and mental states that drive human behavior. Intuitively, it seems clear that what children know about people can have consequences for what children learn from people. Indeed, studies have shown that, where social information is critical (such as in learning about language or culture), children's social knowledge influences how and what they can learn. However, causal learning doesn't necessarily require social information; children can learn about causal relations from associations between events, or by simply observing the consequences of actions. Thus, children's developing social cognition may have unique and importantly different implications for causal learning than for social learning. To date, these implications have been largely unexplored. This project investigates the influence of preschoolers' developing social knowledge on their causal learning. Specifically, it focuses on their developing understanding of epistemic states -- that some people know more than others, and that people may have different areas of expertise and ability. The first four studies use lab-based experimental methods to address (1) whether, as in other learning domains, preschoolers are sensitive to others' past accuracy in causal learning; (2) whether, in contrast to other learning domains, preschoolers show selective trust of others depending on the type of knowledge and expertise they have; (3) how epistemic information (i.e., that one person knows more than another) interacts with statistical information (i.e., a strong vs. weak correlation) in causal learning; and (4) how epistemic information interacts with information from children's own active causal exploration. All four studies include measures to investigate how developmental and individual differences in social cognition contribute to the process of causal learning. Finally, a fifth classroom-based study combines experimental with observational methods to investigate how preschoolers actively engage with social sources in the process of exploratory causal play. There is a trend in early childhood education toward increasing direct instruction, thus more emphasis on social transmission in early learning. Research is needed to better enable us to evaluate this trend. To this aim, the results of this research will have implications for both our understanding of basic learning processes in children and our ability to design effective educational environments for them. The results will also deepen our understanding of the unique processes that characterize early casual learning (the foundation for later science education) and distinguish it from learning in other domains. The final classroom-based study explicitly creates a link between basic research and early childhood education, and is expected to lead to further research targeting this link.

学龄前阶段的特点是儿童的因果知识发生了巨大的变化； 3 岁和 4 岁的孩子对事物运作方式的理论越来越连贯，他们可以推理重力或细菌等隐藏的因果力量，并且可以从新证据中快速学习因果关系。 这些变化伴随着社会知识的同样显着的发展——对驱动人类行为的动机、情感和心理状态的理解。 从直觉上看，孩子对人的了解可能会影响孩子从人那里学到的东西，这一点似乎很明显。 事实上，研究表明，在社会信息至关重要的情况下（例如在学习语言或文化时），儿童的社会知识会影响他们学习的方式和内容。然而，因果学习并不一定需要社交信息；孩子们可以通过事件之间的关联或简单地观察行为的后果来了解因果关系。 因此，儿童发展中的社会认知可能对因果学习和社会学习具有独特且重要不同的影响。 迄今为止，这些影响在很大程度上尚未得到探索。 该项目调查学龄前儿童发展社会知识对其因果学习的影响。具体来说，它侧重于他们对认知状态的不断发展的理解——有些人比其他人知道更多，而且人们可能拥有不同领域的专业知识和能力。前四项研究使用基于实验室的实验方法来解决（1）与其他学习领域一样，学龄前儿童是否对其他人过去在因果学习中的准确性敏感； （2）与其他学习领域相比，学龄前儿童是否根据他们所拥有的知识和专业知识的类型表现出对他人的选择性信任； （3）因果学习中认知信息（即一个人比另一个人知道更多）如何与统计信息（即强相关性与弱相关性）相互作用； (4)认知信息如何与儿童自己积极的因果探索中的信息相互作用。 所有四项研究都包括调查社会认知的发展和个体差异如何促进因果学习过程的措施。 最后，第五项基于课堂的研究将实验与观察方法相结合，调查学龄前儿童在探索性因果游戏过程中如何积极参与社会资源。幼儿教育的趋势是增加直接指导，从而更加强调早期学习的社会传播。 需要进行研究才能更好地评估这一趋势。为此，这项研究的结果将对我们对儿童基本学习过程的理解以及我们为他们设计有效的教育环境的能力产生影响。 研究结果还将加深我们对早期休闲学习（后来科学教育的基础）的独特过程的理解，并将其与其他领域的学习区分开来。 最终的课堂研究明确地在基础研究和幼儿教育之间建立了联系，并有望引发针对这一联系的进一步研究。