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

学龄前是儿童因果知识发生显著变化的时期；3岁和4岁的孩子对事物的运作方式有了越来越连贯的理论，他们可以对重力或细菌等隐藏的因果力进行推理，他们可以从新的证据中迅速了解因果关系。这些变化伴随着社会知识的显著发展——对驱动人类行为的动机、情感和精神状态的理解。从直觉上看，似乎很明显，孩子对别人的了解会影响他们从别人身上学到什么。事实上，研究表明，在社会信息至关重要的地方（如学习语言或文化），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会信息；孩子们可以从事件之间的联系中了解因果关系，或者仅仅通过观察行为的后果。因此，儿童社会认知的发展可能对因果学习和社会学习具有独特而重要的不同含义。迄今为止，这些影响在很大程度上尚未得到探索。本研究旨在探讨学前儿童社会知识发展对其因果学习的影响。具体来说，它关注的是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领域。前四项研究采用基于实验室的实验方法来探讨(1)学龄前儿童在因果学习中是否像在其他学习领域一样，对他人过去的准确性敏感；(2)与其他学习领域相比，学龄前儿童对他人的选择性信任是否取决于他们所拥有的知识和专业知识类型；(3)因果学习中的认知信息（即一个人比另一个人知道得多）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身主动因果探索的信息相互作用。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相结合，探讨了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。幼儿教育有增加直接教学的趋势，因此在早期学习中更加强调社会传递。为了更好地评估这一趋势，需要进行研究。为了达到这个目的，这项研究的结果将对我们对儿童基本学习过程的理解和我们为他们设计有效教育环境的能力产生影响。研究结果还将加深我们对早期随意学习（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.