Causal Reasoning in Children and Adults

儿童和成人的因果推理

• 批准号: 6887718
• 负责人: TAMAR KUSHNIR
• 金额: $ 2.75万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2003
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2003-04-15 至 2006-04-14
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6887718
• 关键词: attention; behavior modification; behavioral /social science research tag; child (0-11); child psychology; clinical research; cognition; conditioning; cues; human subject; judgment; learning; perception; young adult human (21-34)

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Developmental research has shown the profound changes that children's causal knowledge undergoes throughout development. These changes have been identified and thoroughly studied, but the processes and mechanisms behind the changes are still unknown. To better understand the processes involved in developmental change, this proposal examines three sources of causal information - perceptual cues, contingencies, and effects of interventions - and explores how they interact and what they each contribute to the development of causal reasoning in young children. In particular, these studies seek to show that young children pay attention to all three types of information, so that when some information is missing or incomplete, children can use other information to acquire causal knowledge. The first two studies directly contrast perceptual information (spatial contiguity cues) with information about both direct and conditional contingencies in order to observe their relative effects on young children's causal inferences. The third study examines the relative effects of interventions and probabilistic contingency information on adults' causal judgments. The final study looks at the relative effects of interventions and deterministic and probabilistic contingencies on young children's causal judgments. Results of these studies will provide valuable information about the interaction between perception, contingency and intervention underlying the acquisition of causal knowledge, and will help us to understand some of the mechanisms that enable children to learn about the world.

描述（由申请人提供）：发展研究表明，儿童因果知识在整个发展过程中都经历了深刻的变化。这些变化已被识别并进行了彻底的研究，但是变化背后的过程和机制仍然未知。为了更好地了解发展变革所涉及的过程，该提案研究了因果信息的三个来源 - 感知线索，意外情况和干预措施的影响 - 并探讨了它们的相互作用以及它们各自为幼儿因果推理的发展做出贡献。特别是，这些研究旨在表明幼儿注意所有三种类型的信息，以便当一些信息缺失或不完整时，孩子可以使用其他信息来获取因果知识。前两项研究将感知信息（空间连续性提示）与有关直接和条件意外情况的信息直接对比，以观察它们对幼儿因果推断的相对影响。第三项研究研究了干预措施和概率应急信息对成年人因果判断的相对影响。最终的研究着眼于干预措施以及确定性和概率意外事件对幼儿因果判断的相对影响。这些研究的结果将提供有关因果知识获得的感知，应急和干预措施之间相互作用的宝贵信息，并将帮助我们了解一些使儿童能够了解世界的机制。