Deena Skolnick Weisberg

The power of possibility: causal learning, counterfactual reasoning, and pretend play

We argue for a theoretical link between the development of an extended period of immaturity in human evolution and the emergence of powerful and wide-ranging causal learning mechanisms, specifically the use of causal models and Bayesian learning. We suggest that exploratory childhood learning, childhood play in particular, and causal cognition are closely connected. We report an empirical study demonstrating one such connection—a link between pretend play and counterfactual causal reasoning. Preschool children given new information about a causal system made very similar inferences both when they considered counterfactuals about the system and when they engaged in pretend play about it. Counterfactual cognition and causally coherent pretence were also significantly correlated even when age, general cognitive development and executive function were controlled for. These findings link a distinctive human form of childhood play and an equally distinctive human form of causal inference. We speculate that, during human evolution, computations that were initially reserved for solving particularly important ecological problems came to be used much more widely and extensively during the long period of protected immaturity.

Young children separate multiple pretend worlds

Each fictional world that adults create has its own distinct properties, separating it from other fictional worlds. Here we explore whether this separation also exists for young childrens pretend game worlds. Studies 1 and 1A set up two simultaneous games and encouraged children to create appropriate pretend identities for coloured blocks. When prompted with a situation that required the use of a Game 1 object in Game 2, 3- and 4-year-olds were reluctant to move pretend objects between games, even when the alternative-world object was explicitly highlighted as a possible choice. Study 2 found the same effect when the two game worlds were presented sequentially. This suggests that, even for young children, multiple pretend game worlds are kept psychologically separate.

Guided Play Principles and Practices

Competing trends in early childhood education emphasize the need for strong curricular approaches and for unfettered exploration. We propose an approach to early learning that avoids this false dichotomy: guided play. Guided play takes advantage of children’s natural abilities to learn through play by allowing them to express their autonomy within a prepared environment and with adult scaffolding. We provide examples of how guided-play situations have been implemented in past work, as well as evidence that guided play is successful for education across a range of content—perhaps even more successful than other pedagogical approaches.

Mise en place: setting the stage for thought and action

A school became safer after security measures were removed. Children can learn better in playful, rather than didactic, settings. At-risk students earned higher grades after writing about a personal value. A novel construct - mise en place--explains how small changes in context, such as these, can lead to large changes in behaviors by highlighting how the psychology of preparing to act within an environment shapes and is shaped by that environment.

Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative representation of reality, and keeping this representation separate from reality. In turn, according to causal models accounts, counterfactual reasoning is a crucial tool that children need to plan for the future and learn about the world. Both planning with causal models and learning about them require the ability to create false premises and generate conclusions from these premises. We argue that pretending allows children to practice these important cognitive skills. We also consider the prevalence of unrealistic scenarios in childrens play and explain how they can be useful in learning, despite appearances to the contrary.

Embracing complexity: rethinking the relation between play and learning: comment on Lillard et al. (2013).

Lillard et al. (2013) concluded that pretend play is not causally related to child outcomes and charged that the field is subject to a play ethos, whereby research is tainted by a bias to find positive effects of play on child development. In this commentary, we embrace their call for a more solidly scientific approach to questions in this important area of study while offering 2 critiques of their analysis. First, we urge researchers to take a more holistic approach to the body of evidence on play and learning, rather than relying on piecemeal criticisms of individual studies, since positive effects of play on learning emerge despite the use of a variety of methods, contents, and experimental conditions. Second, we consider how best to study this topic in the future and propose moving away from traditional empirical approaches to more complicated statistical models and methods that will allow us to embrace the full variety and complexity of playful learning.

Making play work for education

Children, especially in the preschool years, learn a tremendous amount through play. Research on guided play demonstrates how schools can couple a curriculum-centered preschool program with a developmentally appropriate pedagogical approach to classroom teaching. However, to fully test this claim, we need a clear definition of the term “guided play”: In guided play, the adult structures the play environment, but the child maintains control within that environment. Guided play can lead to dramatically better learning outcomes than didactic situations. If you tell them, children will learn. But if you guide them, children are more likely to actively explore and learn more.

The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information.

Previous work has found that people feel significantly more satisfied with explanations of psychological phenomena when those explanations contain neuroscience information-even when this information is entirely irrelevant to the logic of the explanations. This seductive allure effect was first demonstrated by Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, and Gray (2008), and has since been replicated several times (Fernandez-Duque, Evans, Christian, & Hodges, 2015; Minahan & Siedlecki, 2016; Rhodes, Rodriguez, & Shah, 2014; Weisberg, Taylor, & Hopkins, 2015). However, these studies only examined psychological phenomena. The current study thus investigated the generality of this effect and found that it occurs across several scientific disciplines whenever the explanations include reductive information: reference to smaller components or more fundamental processes. These data suggest that people have a general preference for reductive information, even when it is irrelevant to the logic of an explanation.

Young Children are Reality-Prone When Thinking about Stories

Abstract Many parents and some researchers assume that young children are fantastical thinkers. We examined this assumption in the domain of reasoning about fictional stories. We presented 4-year-olds with realistic and fantastical stories and asked them how best to continue these stories: with ordinary events or with events that violate real-world causal laws. Children preferred the ordinary events for both types of stories (Experiment 1, n=42) while a comparison group of adults (n=68) continued stories based on their content. To ensure that children’s responses reflected their intuitions about stories per se, Experiment 2 (n=60) asked 4-year-olds to make the same choice between realistic and fantastical events, but in the context of figuring out an experimenter’s preferences or learning a new word. Here, children did not demonstrate an overall bias for the realistic events. These findings suggest that children are reality-prone in the context of fictional stories.

Tell Me a Story: How Children's Developing Domain Knowledge Affects Their Story Construction

Young children distinguish between the physical and biological domains of knowledge. The current study examines how this distinction is expressed in a story construction task. Three- and 4-year-olds were shown pairs of pictures, one that depicted a normal event and one that depicted an event that violated either physical or biological causal structure. Children were asked to choose which picture to include in a story. Three-year-olds generally showed no systematic patterns of responses when constructing their stories. Four-year-olds, in contrast, made more normal than violation choices overall, and their stories were relatively consistent with regard to the fictional worlds internal coherence. When 4-year-olds did include violation events in their stories, those violations tended to be of physical rather than biological causality. These data suggest that a general understanding of impossible events is underpinned by causal domain knowledge.