Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Do children reason about causal events differently in physically ‘live’ and digital domains? To answer this question,we introduced 35 3-year-olds to the traditional live version and a newly developed digital version of the “blicket detector” task.In both formats, the “blicket detector” first produced an interesting event (e.g., lit up) when a distinctive object (e.g., cylindricalblock) touched its surface, but then failed to do so when a different object (e.g., triangular block) did so. After both blocks thensimultaneously touched (and activated) the “blicket detector,” children were asked to identify the ‘causal’ block. Children’sperformance correlated significantly across the physical and digital trials (r = .4, p = .02). Not only does this study further ourunderstanding of children’s causal reasoning skills in the digital domain, it introduces a major methodological advance with thedevelopment of a highly efficient and reliable digital version of the “blicket” task.