The Experimental Study Of Children's Early Causal Reasoning

Causal cognition is the core and foundation for getting to know and understanding theobjective world. Children's causal cognition has received increasingly more and moreattention from psychologists with massive research results accumulated in this field. In theI 970s,some researchers sought to analyze the development of children's causal inferenceability by employing empirical methods and prescribing artificial causal inference tasks.However, few researchers were aware of the influence exerted on children's causal inferenceby rule dimensions and inference directions.Therefore, this research has designed response types, inference directions, and ruledimensions by "Two-input to two-output" equipment. This study has studied 66 3.5 to4.5-year olds-children in terms of the development of their inference ability. Thus, thefollowing conclusions have been drawn:1.The age range from 3.5 to 4 years is a rapid period for the development of children'scausal inference ability. At this stage , the age shows an obvious effect on the developmentand children's inference ability undergoes a rapid development. At about the age of 4.5,mostchildren possess causal inference ability;2.In the experiment, no influence on children's performance in causal inference exertedby response type has been discovered. The experiment starts when children are familiar withthe rule of the experiment, and the performances demonstrate no significant differences withthe two response types of manual control and verbal report.3.Inference direction can affect children's causal inference performance with childrendemonstrating significant differences in causal inference tasks of different directions.Children achieve better performance in carrying out cause-to-effect inference tasks than ineffect-to-cause inference tasks. The performance discrepancies decrease gradually withchildren's age range going upward. At the age of 4.5 years old, children's exactness rate inperforming the two types of tasks is over 75%, which shows that children at age 4.5 havenearly mastered the reversibility of thinking and are able to perform backward inference.4.Rule dimension is also an important factor that affects children's performance incausal inference. Children demonstrate significant differences among their performances withdifferent dimensions. One-dimension causal inference is easier while inference withthree-dimension conjunctive rule poses more difficulties.5.When children encounter difficulties in causal inference, they tend to demonstrate a"vertical bias" originating from their empirical judgment. This phenomenon can be observedboth in different children and in the same children performing different tasks. It suggests thatchildren's causal inference could be both rule-based and experience-based.