CogSci 2025

•

August 01, 2025

•

San Francisco, United States

keywords:

cognitive development

concepts and categories

learning

psychology

causal reasoning

reasoning

Children are adept at learning the principles and properties governing their environment. However, this environment is often highly inconsistent: causes do not always bring about their effects; people do not always act according to their preferences. Past research shows that young causal learners readily reason from probabilistic evidence, but little is known as to how they reason about that evidence. This study presented preschoolers (N=114) with the behavior of three different causes—one consistently effective, one consistently ineffective, and one inconsistent—from one of three domains (social, mechanical, biological) and asked children to predict the future behavior of each. Children’s predictions not only captured the different degrees of inconsistency observed in the evidence but also reflected differences in prior knowledge and expectations about inconsistency between domains. These results offer a novel, more nuanced look into early causal cognition and often-overlooked complexities of causal learning and reasoning in the real world.

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