An Experiment Research On Mechanism-based Of Children’s Early-stage Causal Inference

Causal cognitive is the core and foundation for getting to know and understanding the objective world. Children’s causal cognition has received increasing more and more attention from psychologists with massive research results accumulated in the field. A lot of researches use experiments to study the development of children causal cognition according to the domestic and foreign. However, few researchers were aware of the influence exerted on children develop an understanding of causal mechanisms children’s causal inference in our country.Therefore, this research has designed 3 experiments to test children develop an understanding of causal mechanisms. The following conclusions have been drawn:1、In Experiment 1, preschoolers had to choose as efficacious either a cause that had worked in the past, but was now disconnected from its effect, or a cause that had failed to work previously, but was now connected. Four-year-olds chose the now-connected cause more often than 3-year-olds.2、In Experiment 2,present the same causal mechanism like experiment 1 to 4-year-olds, they responded appropriately to an irrelevant modification. So, 4-year-olds are capable of understanding causal mechanism with respect to connect status.3、In Experiment 3, present 3-year-olds the causal mechanism we believed children would understand at this age, they could properly distinguish between relevant and irrelevant modifications. Demonstrated 3-year-olds do not understand the mechanism “connection”. When the causal mechanism was “batteries”, 3-year-olds can work the causal inference. So, 3-year-olds have the capable of understand specific causal mechanisms.In short, these data suggest that understanding of specific causal mechanisms develops at different ages.