The Invisible Hand: Toddlers Connect Probabilistic Events With Agentive Causes

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Development
• Developmental Psychology
• Causal Inference

Background:

• Children infer unobserved causes for spontaneous events.
• Research question: Do children infer unobserved causes for probabilistic events?

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate toddlers' causal reasoning with probabilistic events.
• Determine if toddlers attribute probabilistic outcomes to unobserved agents.

Main Methods:

• Toddlers (20.1 months) observed arbitrary causal relationships.
• Causal relationships were altered deterministically or probabilistically.
• Novel candidate causes (agent vs. non-agent) were introduced.

Main Results:

• Toddlers showed similar looking times for deterministic and probabilistic changes in causal relationships.
• Toddlers looked longer at novel agents in deterministic conditions compared to probabilistic ones.
• Looking times for novel non-agents did not differ between conditions.

Conclusions:

• By 20 months, toddlers differentiate between deterministic and probabilistic causal events.
• Toddlers connect probabilistic events with the presence of unobserved agents.
• Suggests early development of sophisticated causal inference abilities in young children.