The Relative Role Of The Cause Festure And The Effect Feature In Children’s Inductive Reasoning

Induction,or inductive reasoning, is accord to the known knowledge and observations to predict the new sample, reduce human’s dependence on memory, so that knowledge can be a simple process. Last three decades, the study found that young children even babies can inductive simply.However, there are still heated debate on the early childhood’s mechanism of the inductive reasoning. Many researchers believe that causal relations play a key role in determing the categories and concepts. The so-called causality, refers to one or more variables determine the results of the other variables, that is the reason variable can predict and control the effect of the outcome variables.Some psychologists have also argued that the most powerful inductive reasoning from a causal relationship between the original stimulus and target stimulus. Because compared to the perception of similarity,causality is characteristically and covers wide range of information, people are more inclined to the induction base.Sloman and Lagnado (2005) also pointed out that use causal relationship to inductive reasoning is human nature, establish a model based on the causal relationship is the key to understand human’s inductive reasoning.Therefore,whether children can inductive reasoning based on the causal relationship,how the causal relationship affect the induction of children, become the key to understand the psychological mechanisms of early childhood inductive reasoning.Ahn et al(Ahn,1998; Ahn & Kim,2000)proposed the causal status hypothesis, the importance of causal relationship determining categories and concepts is that:1) to some extent, cause feature and effect feature are more important than other features; 2) cause feature is more important than effect feature. Therefore, whether children are able to generalize basing on causal features is the key of understanding psychological mechanism of inductive reasoning in early childhood (Sloman & Lagnado,2005). If children in early childhood are able to do this, we can indicate that their inductive reasoning is based on the concept of knowledge. However, many existing research of discussing the impact of causal relationship on children’s inductive reasoning have focused on the comparison of children’s induction performance when the causal relationship conflict with perceptual cues. In other words, they focus on investgating whether the causal features is better than other features (eg., perceptual feature)in inductive reasoning of early childhood. Inductive reasoning in early childhood, few researchers study cause feature is more important than effect feature.This study is to further expand the studies of Ahn et al (2000) and Meunier and Cordier (2009), and to explore the relative role of the cause festure and effect feature in children’s inductive reasoning. In order to investgate the time when children can understand the cause feature is more important than the effect feature when the causal relationship in determining the categories and concepts and use this understanding to determine their induction, we used classical picture-triad induction tasks. We set up two experiments to test inductive reasoning of children, ages in 35-64 months, in the condition of the missing features.The results show that when one cause lead to two effects, while in the choice of induction tasks one is the missing-cause option and the other is the missing-effect option, the children’s choices of the missing-effect option (based on cause feature) have the trajectory of development.4 and 5 year old children, based on causal feature in their inductive reasoning, judged the missing-effect option were more likely to have the same properties of the target stimulus, indicating that 4 to 5 year old children could recognize the cause feature is more important than the effect feature in their inductive reasoning.3 and 3.5 year old children did not show this trend, having significantly different results when compared with 4 and 5 years old children.The capability of children to use causal knowledge for inductive reasoning developed rapidly between the ages of 3.5 to 4 years.The results of this study indicate that at least 4-year-old children can also show causal status effect in their inductive task. This result is also in accord with children’s inductive performance when the causal relationship conflict with perceptual cues (Nazzi & Gopnik,2000; Sobel, et al.,2007), and challenges the point of Sloutsky etc. (Sloutsky, Lo,& Fisher,2001; Fisher & Sloutsky,2005) that children before the age of 7 to 8 year old are mainly based on perceptual cues to generalize.