Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Rational constructivism believes children are active learners, they are able to learn causal rules through free play. Empir-ical evidence has demonstrated that 2- and 3-year-old children successfully identified causality and acquired higher-ordergeneralizations using self-generated evidence during free play, and their performances were same as in didactic learn-ing(Sim & Xu, 2017). However, if this conclusion is true across cultures? In the current study, we used the same methodsand found that 2.5- to 4-year-old Chinese children could also acquire higher-order generalizations under two differentlearning conditions, but their performances were better in the didactic condition than that in the free play condition. Oneof the reasons affected childrens learning is parenting styles, but only in the free play condition: children with authoritativeparents performed significantly better than children with authoritarian parents.