About this session

Saturday, 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Not According to Plan: How Young Learners Explain and Explore the Unexpected

Children are adept at learning the principles and properties governing the behavior of their environment. However, this behavior is highly inconsistent: causes do not always bring about their effects; people do not always follow their beliefs or preferences. While probabilistic evidence does not prevent children learning causal structure (e.g., Kushnir & Gopnik, 2005), we don’t know what young causal learners make of inconsistent behavior itself.

This symposium brings together new research examining how 3-6-year-olds represent and reason about the unexpected during causal learning. To begin, we consider how learners react to and investigate causal systems that do not behave as expected. Talk 1 examines children’s exploration of probabilistic versus deterministic causal systems that work for others but not for themselves. Talk 2 broadens our understanding of this self-directed investigation by determining how parental involvement impacts children’s causal learning from unexpected failures and raises the question: how do learners go from investigation to explanation? Talk 3 documents children’s willingness to explain patterns of observed data using unexpected causal rules relative to typical ones. Finally, Talk 4 investigates whether children appeal to internal or external factors to explain unexpected behavior from social agents versus machines and how this tendency develops in early childhood.

Together, these projects shed light on an often-overlooked, critical challenge of causal learning. They help reconcile past findings about young learners’ acceptance of probabilistic causes, advance our understanding of the nature and complexity of children’s mental representations, and have implications for the development of social understanding and modal thought.

Paper #1
Title	Children’s Exploration of Deterministic Versus Probabilistic Causal Systems Which Work for Others but Not Themselves
Presenting author	Caiqin Zhou, Brown University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Caregiver impact on 3- to 6-year-old children’s mechanistic causal reasoning during contexts of failure
Presenting author	Gauri Harindranath, Tufts University, United States

Paper #3
Title	Children’s use of feature-based and alternation-based rules to explain causal relationships
Presenting author	Rebekah Gelpí, University of Toronto, Canada

Paper #4
Title	Internal disposition or external disruption: young learners’ explanations of inconsistent behavior in people versus machines
Presenting author	Dr. Elizabeth Lapidow, Ph.D., University of Waterloo, United States

View all paper details

Session chairs
Dr. Elizabeth Lapidow, Ph.D., University of Waterloo, Canada; Stephanie Denison, Ph.D., , Canada

⇦ Back to schedule