Caren M. Walker

Toddlers Infer Higher-Order Relational Principles in Causal Learning

Children make inductive inferences about the causal properties of individual objects from a very young age. When can they infer higher-order relational properties? In three experiments, we examined 18- to 30-month-olds’ relational inferences in a causal task. Results suggest that at this age, children are able to infer a higher-order relational causal principle from just a few observations and use this inference to guide their own subsequent actions and bring about a novel causal outcome. Moreover, the children passed a revised version of the relational match-to-sample task that has proven very difficult for nonhuman primates. The findings are considered in light of their implications for understanding the nature of relational and causal reasoning, and their evolutionary origins.

Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties

Four experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3- to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal property. Experiment 2 replicated this effect of explanation in a case of label extension (i.e., categorization). Experiment 3 demonstrated that explanation improves memory for clusters of causally relevant (non-perceptual) features, but impairs memory for superficial (perceptual) features, providing evidence that effects of explanation are selective in scope and apply to memory as well as inference. In sum, our data support the proposal that engaging in explanation influences childrens reasoning by privileging inductively rich, causal properties.

Mental state attribution and the temporoparietal junction: an fMRI study comparing belief, emotion, and perception.

By age 2, children attribute referential mental states such as perceptions and emotions to themselves and others, yet it is not until age 4 that they attribute representational mental states such as beliefs. This raises an interesting question: is attribution of beliefs different from attribution of perceptions and emotions in terms of its neural substrate? To address this question with a high degree of anatomic specificity, we partitioned the TPJ, a broad area often found to be recruited in theory of mind tasks, into 2 neuroanatomically specific regions of interest: Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS) and Inferior Parietal Lobule (IPL). To maximize behavioral specificity, we designed a tightly controlled verbal task comprised of sets of single sentences--sentences identical except for the type of mental state specified in the verb (belief, emotion, perception, syntax control). Results indicated that attribution of beliefs more strongly recruited both regions of interest than did emotions or perceptions. This is especially surprising with respect to STS, since it is widely reported in the literature to mediate the detection of referential states--among them emotions and perceptions--rather than the inference of beliefs. An explanation is offered that focuses on the differences between verbal stimuli and visual stimuli, and between a process of sentence comprehension and a process of visual detection.

Learning to Learn from Stories: Children's Developing Sensitivity to the Causal Structure of Fictional Worlds.

Fiction presents a unique challenge to the developing child, in that children must learn when to generalize information from stories to the real world. This study examines how children acquire causal knowledge from storybooks, and whether children are sensitive to how closely the fictional world resembles reality. Preschoolers (N = 108) listened to stories in which a novel causal relation was embedded within realistic or fantastical contexts. Results indicate that by at least 3 years of age, children are sensitive to the underlying causal structure of the story: Children are more likely to generalize content if the fictional world is similar to reality. Additionally, children become better able at discriminating between realistic and fantastical story contexts between 3 and 5 years of age.

Pretense and Possibility—A Theoretical Proposal About the Effects of Pretend Play on Development: Comment on Lillard et al. (2013)

The review by Lillard et al. (2013) highlighted the need for additional research to better clarify the nature of the relationship between pretend play and development. However, the authors did not provide a proposal for how to structure the direction of this future work. Here, we provide a possible framework for generating additional research. This theoretical proposal is based on recent computational approaches to cognition, in which counterfactual reasoning plays a central role in causal learning. We propose that pretend play initially emerges as a product of the cognitive mechanisms underlying human learning and then feeds back to become critical for enhancing the optimal functioning of these same processes. More specifically, we argue that pretending is in fact 1 of several forms of counterfactual reasoning, which is essential to causal cognition-and that the act of engaging in pretend scenarios may provide early opportunities to practice the skills that were initially responsible for its appearance. Here, we provide a brief overview of this theoretical framework, consider how these ideas may be integrated with the previous work covered in Lillard et al.s (2013) review, and suggest some empirically testable questions to direct future directions.

The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of knowledge and search on inferring abstract concepts

We explore the developmental trajectory and underlying mechanisms of abstract relational reasoning. We describe a surprising developmental pattern: Younger learners are better than older ones at inferring abstract causal relations. Walker and Gopnik (2014) demonstrated that toddlers are able to infer that an effect was caused by a relation between two objects (whether they are the same or different), rather than by individual kinds of objects. While these findings are consistent with evidence that infants recognize same-different relations, they contrast with a large literature suggesting that older children tend to have difficulty inferring these relations. Why might this be? In Experiment 1a, we demonstrate that while younger children (18-30-month-olds) have no difficulty learning these relational concepts, older children (36-48-month-olds) fail to draw this abstract inference. Experiment 1b replicates the finding with 18-30-month-olds using a more demanding intervention task. Experiment 2 tests whether this difference in performance might be because older children have developed the general hypothesis that individual kinds of objects are causal - the high initial probability of this alternative hypothesis might override the data that favors the relational hypothesis. Providing additional information falsifying the alternative hypothesis improves older childrens performance. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrates that prompting for explanations during learning also improves performance, even without any additional information. These findings are discussed in light of recent computational and algorithmic theories of learning.

Engagement in Philosophical Dialogue Facilitates Children's Reasoning about Subjectivity.

Theories of learning have long emphasized the essential role of social factors in the development of early reasoning abilities. More recently, it has been proposed that the presentation of conflicting perspectives may facilitate young childrens understanding of knowledge claims as potentially subjective-one of many possible representations of the world. This development in epistemological understanding has been proposed to be an important determinant of academic performance and is highly correlated with the ability to understand and produce sound argumentation in adolescents and adults. In a longitudinal study of children 7-8 years old, we assessed the effects of a 3-month philosophy class designed to engage children in dialogic interaction with peers. We examined the influence of this intervention on childrens epistemological understanding and argumentation skills in 4 domains of knowledge: aesthetic, value, social, and physical. Participation in dialogic interaction in an elementary school classroom improved childrens ability to construct their own and opposing arguments across domains and facilitated reasoning about the subjectivity of knowledge in the value domain.

Achieving abstraction: Generating far analogies promotes relational reasoning in children.

Analogical reasoning is essential for transfer by supporting recognition of relational similarity. However, not all analogies are created equal. The source and target can be similar (near), or quite different (far). Previous research suggests that close comparisons facilitate children’s relational abstraction. On the other hand, evidence from adults indicates that the process of solving far analogies may be a more effective scaffold for transfer of a relational strategy. We explore whether engaging with far analogies similarly induces such a strategy in preschoolers. Children were provided with the opportunity to solve either a near or far spatial analogy using a pair of puzzle boxes that varied in perceptual similarity (Experiment 1), or to participate in a control task (Experiment 2). All groups were then presented with an ambiguous spatial reasoning task featuring both object and relational matches. We were interested in the relationship between near and far conditions and two effects: (a) children’s tendency to spontaneously draw an analogy when solving the initial puzzle, and (b) their tendency to privilege relational matches over object matches in a subsequent, ambiguous task. Although children were more likely to spontaneously draw an analogy in the near condition, those who attempted the far analogy were more likely to privilege a relational match on the subsequent task. We argue that the process of solving a far analogy—regardless of a learner’s spontaneous success in identifying the relation—contextualizes an otherwise ambiguous learning problem, making it easier for children to access and apply relational hypotheses.