A Comparative Study On Causal Reasoning Of "Object" Or "Relation" On The Three-year-Old Children From China And America

Researchers generally believe that preschool children would make causal inference according to the properties of the object surface,and then with their age increases,gradually realize the similar structure relationship between objects,develop the abstract and generalized thinking ability to do causal inference.However,a series of recent studies have found that the development of causal reasoning in preschool children is not always developing from specific object observations to abstract relation thinking with their age increases.Researchers found that early children's cognition of causality and their development of causal reasoning are a recurring and changeable process.For example,a study by Professor Walker of University of California at San Diego found that most of 3-year-old children in USA failed in the"same-difference" causality reasoning test,but most children who were in 18-30 months succeeded.This finding arouse researchers' great interest and curiosity about the failure of 3-year-old American children in the relation causal reasoning test,which is the origin of our study.In the study by Walker,3-year-old children in USA failed to make causal reasoning because they focused too much on the surface properties of single objects and showed an object bias.The 3 year old American children's object bias is accidental or related to their specific cultural and linguistic environment,which is what we want to explore in this study.According to some related literature of cultural and linguistic differences between China and the USA,we have carried out a comparative study of "object" or "relation" on 3-year-old children from China and America.There are two studies in total.Experiment la is a multiple causal reasoning test of "object" or "relation".By setting an ambiguous context,we can see whether there is a significant difference between Chinese children and American children.Experimental lb is a single cause and effect mechanism relational reasoning task.Study 2 is to verify the hypothesis proposed by previous researchers:a large number of noun learning may cause 3-year-old children in U.S.to have an object bias.The following conclusions are drawn through the study in the paper.(1)Study 1,Experiment 1a,American children in 3 years old tend to make an object causal inference answer,and show an object-centric thinking,Chinese 3-year-old children tend to give the relation causal inference answer,and show a relation-centric thinking.Experiemnt 1b,3-year-old children in U.S.mostly failed,they still had an object bias;3-year-old children in China most succeeded.(2)According to two experiments in study 1,we believe that children's early experience and their growing environment,such as culture,will affect their cognitive development of relational causal reasoning.(3)Study 2,after 40 nouns training and learning,Chinese children did not appear on the surface of individual attributes(such as color and shape)and paid much attention,they still chose relation answer.(4)From study 2,we believe that whether the learning of different language structure(such as nouns or verbs)affects the causal reasoning cognition development of early childhood,it is still unknown yet.