Can being scared make your tummy ache? Naive theories, ambiguous evidence and preschoolers' causal inferences (original) (raw)

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domain-general statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, preschoolers were presented with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard two stories in which two candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the form: AB E, AC E, AD E, etc. In one story, all variables came from the same domain; in the other, the recurring candidate cause, A, came from a different domain (A was a psychological cause of a biological effect). After receiving this statistical evidence, children were asked to identify the cause of the effect on a new trial. Consistent with the predictions of a Bayesian model, all children were more likely to identify A as the cause within domains than across domains. While three-and-half-year-olds learned only from the withindomain evidence, four-and five-year-olds learned from the cross-domain evidence and were able to transfer their new expectations about psychosomatic causality to a novel task.