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

学龄前儿童的特点是因果知识的非凡变化; 3岁和4岁的孩子对事物的运作方式有越来越连贯的理论，他们可以推理出隐藏的因果力量，如重力或细菌，他们可以从新的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著的发展--对驱动人类行为的动机、情感和精神状态的理解。 直觉上，似乎很明显，孩子们对人的了解会对孩子们从人身上学到的东西产生影响。 事实上，研究表明，在社会信息至关重要的情况下（如在学习语言或文化方面），儿童的社会知识会影响他们如何学习和学习什么。然而，因果学习并不一定需要社会信息;孩子们可以从事件之间的联系中学习因果关系，或者通过简单地观察行为的后果。 因此，儿童的发展社会认知可能有独特的和重要的不同的影响，因果学习比社会学习。 到目前为止，这些影响基本上还没有被探索。 本研究旨在探讨幼儿社会知识发展对因果学习的影响。具体来说，它侧重于他们对认知状态的理解--有些人比其他人知道得更多，人们可能有不同的专业知识和能力。前四项研究使用基于实验室的实验方法来解决（1）是否像在其他学习领域一样，学龄前儿童在因果学习中对他人过去的准确性敏感;（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对他人表现出选择性信任;（3）认知信息（即，一个人比另一个人知道更多）与统计信息交互（即，（4）认知信息如何与儿童自己主动探索的信息相互作用。 所有四项研究都包括调查社会认知中的发展差异和个体差异如何促进因果学习过程的措施。 最后，第五个以课堂为基础的研究结合实验与观察的方法，探讨学龄前儿童如何积极参与社会资源的探索性因果游戏的过程中。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，以便更好地评估这一趋势。为此，本研究的结果将对我们理解儿童的基本学习过程和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。 最后一项以课堂为基础的研究明确地建立了基础研究与幼儿教育之间的联系，并有望导致针对这一联系的进一步研究。

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.