Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self-directed learners are often described as ‘intuitive scientists’, yet they also tend to struggle in assessments of their scientific reasoning. We investigate a novel explanation for this apparent gap between formal and informal scientific inquiry. Specifically, we consider whether learners’ documented failure to correctly apply the control of variables strategy might stem from a mismatch between their causal intuitions and task presentation. Children (7- and 9-year-olds) and adults were tested on a version of a traditional multivariate reasoning task (Tschirgi, 1980) that we modified to clarify ambiguous elements of the causal logic. A significant majority of participants in all age groups selected informative experiments on this modified task, avoiding confounded actions with positive tangible outcomes. This finding contrasts with the longstanding claim that learners do not correctly employ control of variables without extensive training and suggests that self-directed scientific inquiry may be intuitively suited to support causal learning goals.