Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Intervention selection is at once crucial in causal learning andchallenging for causal learners. While the optimal strategy ismaximizing the expected information gain (EIG), both chil-dren and adults often combine it with suboptimal ones suchas the positive test strategy (PTS). In the current study, wesought to facilitate causal learning from intervention by asking5- to 7-year-olds to explain why they chose a certain interven-tion to identify the true structure of a three-node causal sys-tem that might work in one of two ways. Our findings suggestthat while engaging in self-explaining did not help children se-lect more informative interventions, asking them to think abouttheir intervention choices (explaining or reporting) might helpthem better utilize interventional data to infer causal structures.