Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An open question in the developmental causal learning literature concerns how children's beliefs about causal systems impact their inferences. This study investigated how 4- and 5-year-olds' causal beliefs related to their “backwards blocking” abilities, as well as whether associative learning or Bayesian inference better explained their judgements. Children were taught either that two causes together produced a larger effect than that produced by each individually or that they produced the same size effect as that produced by either one. A third group received no training. Results indicated that 4-year-olds engaged in backwards blocking only after additivity training and that their inferences mainly matched an associative model. In contrast, 5-year-olds consistently engaged in backwards blocking and produced responses that largely matched a Bayesian model. These findings suggest that the effect of children's beliefs about causal systems on their inferences undergoes a developmental progression and implicate the role of multiple cognitive mechanisms.