"The Block Makes It Go": Causal Language Helps Toddlers Integrate Prediction, Action, and Expectations about Contact Relations

“The Block Makes It Go”: Causal Language Helps Toddlers Integrate Prediction, Action, and Expectations about Contact Relations Elizabeth Bonawitz 1 , Alexandra Horowitz 1 , Darlene Ferranti 2 , & Laura Schulz 1 (liz_b@mit.edu) Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Division of Hospital Medicine, Northwestern University; Chicago, IL 60611 USA Abstract Some researchers have suggested that correlation information and information about action are bound in a single representation: “causal knowledge”. If children have only observed correlation information, do they spontaneously try to generate the effect? Do they represent the relationship as potentially causal? We present three action and looking-time studies that suggest that even when toddlers (mean; 24 months) predict that one event will follow another, they neither initiate the first event to try to generate the second (as preschoolers, mean 47 months, do spontaneously), nor do they expect that the predictive relations will involve physical contact. Toddlers succeed at both of these inferences when the events are described using causal language. This suggests that causal language plays a role in helping children recognize the relationship between prediction, action, and contact causality. Keywords: Causality; Language; Cognitive Development No action from association Classical conditioning and operant learning are two ways in which animals learn relationships in the environment. However, animals do not naturally bind these kinds of information together: Pavlov’s dog may learn to drool at the sound of a bell in anticipation of dinner, but will not spontaneously ring the bell to bring dinner (e.g., Gopnik & Schulz, 2004; Tomasello & Call, 1997; Blaisdell, 2008). In contrast, when adult humans observe correlated events, we can represent the events as potentially causally connected and can successfully intervene to determine whether or not one event is a direct cause of the other. This suggests that for adults, correlation information and information about action are bound in a single representation: “causal knowledge”. We do not know however, to what extent infants and young children can move from prediction to action, nor to what extent children infer that physical events that predict one another may involve spatial contact. Researchers have long speculated about the relationship between correlation information and causal knowledge, and in particular, about the relationship between prediction and action. Philosophers have suggested that only a cognitively sophisticated being would recognize “that the very same relationship that he exploits in intervening also can be present both when other agents intervene and in nature even when no other agents are involved” (Woodward, 2004). Similarly, psychologists have suggested that causal knowledge requires understanding causal relations as stable relations among diverse events, not merely relations “that involve rewards or punishments (as in classical or operant conditioning), and not just events that immediately result from (one’s) own actions (as in operant conditioning or trial-and-error learning)” (Gopnik et al., 2004). The implication is that human beings may be unique among animals in having the single representation (causal knowledge) that encodes the potential commonality between non-agentive covariation in the world and covariation between agent actions and outcomes. In our first experiment, we look at whether older and younger children can use a predictive relationship between two events to initiate the target action and anticipate the outcome of their own action. In the second experiment, we test the hypothesis that causal language might help children recognize the relevance of predictive relations to their own interventions. In the third experiment, we eliminate the action measure and use a violation of expectation paradigm (manipulating the presence or absence of contact causality) to assess whether toddlers simply have difficulty bridging the gap between prediction and action or whether, in the absence of causal language, they also fail to expect that predictive relations respect principles of contact causality. Experiment 1: From prediction to action We introduce children to several trials of a novel event: all children see a block contact a base, after which a toy connected to the base lights up and spins. Following these observations, we ask whether children predicatively look to the toy when the block touches the base, and whether children (spontaneously or with prompting) touch the block to the base and then look to the toy. Our primary question is whether children use the evidence from the observation trials to infer that their action might generate the target outcome. Note that simply performing the action might not mean that the child expects the action to generate the outcome. To ensure that the child acts with the expectation that the outcome might result, we coded children’s predicative looks to the toy after performing the action. Methods Participants. Sixteen preschoolers (m=47mos; rng: 37-60 mos) and 14 toddlers (m=24 mos; rng: 19-30 mos) were recruited from a large metropolitan science museum. Materials. A large stage blocked a confederate from view. A purple block was attached to a concealed lever which slid across a slit in the stage, creating a track for the block, and leading to a second block (base) which remained fixed to the left of the stage. An orange wire attached the base to a toy airplane in the stage’s upper left corner. The airplane was controlled by a button on the back of the airplane which could be surreptitiously activated by the confederate and which caused the toy to spin and light up.