The impact of interactivity of touchscreen technology on 4- and 5-year-old children's causal learning and transfer

The present study aimed to explore whether interactive touchscreen could facilitate children's causal learning and transfer compared with demonstration and video. In Experiment 1 (n = 121, 54 girls) and Experiment 2 (n = 133, 61 girls), 4- and 5-year-olds either passively observed screen-based demonstration, and video, or actively interacted with blocks on the touchscreen to make accurate inferences about the causal relationship between the color of the blocks and their corresponding effect. We presented children with 100% and 75% possibilities of causality and tested their ability of discriminating between these two competing causal hypotheses with different possibilities on the touchscreen. The results suggested that interaction with touchscreens was superior to screen-based demonstration and video learning for helping 4-year-olds identify 100% and 75% color feature hypotheses and distinguish the most likely color hypothesis in both simple and generalized conflict tasks. For 5-year-olds, it specifically aided in resolving generalized conflict tasks. In Experiment 3 (n = 139, 69 girls), we not only replicated our previous findings but also found that interaction learning helped children to transfer the causality abstracted from touchscreen to reality. Specifically, interacting with blocks on the touchscreen supported 4-year-old children to successfully perform cross-medium near transfer and 5-year-old children to perform cross-medium near and far transfer, but these abilities were not available for demonstration and video learning. In conclusion, findings demonstrated that touchscreen interactivity has the potential to facilitate 4- and 5-year-olds' causal learning and transfer compared to demonstration and video learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).