Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research documented adults’ preference for stable causal relationships that do not vary in strength across backgrounds (Vasilyeva, Blanchard, & Lombrozo, 2018). In this study, we investigate the role of causal stability in guiding children’s exploration behavior. We developed a computerized version of an active information-search paradigm to study how children dynamically explore different agents and backgrounds to learn more about their causal stability. Five- to seven-year-old children (n = 60) were presented with stable and unstable causes (i.e., causes with fixed or variable causal efficacy across backgrounds). We assessed children’s causal attributions of outcomes and their exploratory behavior as they tried out previously observed and novel causes across previously observed and novel backgrounds. We find that children in this age range acknowledge causal instability in their causal attributions, and they become increasingly adept at tracking causal efficacy across multiple factors simultaneously (causes and backgrounds), but this does not translate into a blanket preference for exploring stable or unstable causes. We suggest a possibility that causal (in)stability guides exploration in more subtle and indirect ways and discuss the implications of our findings for the development of active exploration.