Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We investigate whether children preferentially selectinformative actions and make accurate inferences from theoutcome of their own interventions in a causal learning task.Four- to six-year-olds were presented with a novel systemcomposed of two gears that could operate according to twopossible causal structures (single or multiple cause). Giventhe choice between interventions (i.e., removing one of thegears to observe the remaining gear in isolation), childrendemonstrated a clear preference for the action that revealedthe true causal structure, and made subsequent causaljudgments that were consistent with the outcome observed.Experiment 2 addressed the possibility that performance wasdriven by children’s tendency to select an intervention thatwould produce a desirable effect (i.e., spinning gears), ratherthan to disambiguate the causal structure. The results replicateour initial findings in a context in which the informativeaction was less likely to produce a positive outcome than theuninformative one. We discuss these results in terms of theirsignificance for understanding both the development ofscientific reasoning and the role of self-directed actions inearly learning.