Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do children’s beliefs about a causal system influence theirexploration of that system? Children watched an experimentertry to make a machine play music by placing blocks on top; oneblock always activated the machine and the other block neverdid (Deterministic condition), or one block activated the ma-chine a higher proportion of times than the other (Probabilisticcondition). Subsequently, we measured children’s exploratorybehaviors without feedback (the machine never activated). Wepredicted that children in the two conditions would differ intheir beliefs about how the system should work, leading to dif-ferent hypotheses about why the machine was no longer work-ing, and to differential exploration. Compared to the Proba-bilistic condition, children in the Deterministic condition in-tervened more often with the previously more effective block,experimented more with how to activate the machine, and ex-plored for less time. Children’s exploration provides a rich,nuanced view of their causal reasoning.