Preschoolers prefer to learn causal information

Abstract

Young children, in general, appear to have a strong drive to explore the environment in ways that reveal its underlying causal structure. But are they really attuned specifically to casual information in this quest for understanding, or do they show equal interest in other types of non-obvious information about the world? To answer this question, we introduced 20 three-year-old children to two puppets who were anxious to tell the child about a set of novel artifacts and animals. One puppet consistently described causal properties of the items while the other puppet consistently described carefully matched non-causal properties of the same items. After a familiarization period in which children learned which type of information to expect from each informant, children were given the opportunity to choose which they wanted to hear describe each of eight pictured test items. On average, children chose to hear from the informant that provided causal descriptions on 72% of the trials. This preference for causal information has important implications for explaining the role of conceptual information in supporting early learning and may suggest means for maximizing interest and motivation in young children.

Children’s Preference for Causal Information in Storybooks

“…This finding is consistent with prior research and theory detailing young children's "causal stance, " or early emerging motivation to acquire causally-relevant knowledge (e.g., Gopnik, 2000;Alvarez and Booth, 2014). In particular, the current work parallels Alvarez and Booth (2015), in which preschoolers explicitly chose to learn about the causal powers of objects and animals over other types of information. One key strength of this study is that it extends the generalizability of these findings to a somewhat more realistic setting: shared book-reading.…”

“…Therefore, it might be possible that children's preference for causally rich texts is driven by a more basic preference for dynamic action. While we are unable to explicitly test this possibility in the current study, the trial-by-trial responses of preschoolers tested by Alvarez and Booth (2015) were not affected by the degree of dynamic information embedded in item descriptions provided by puppet informants. Although this related data suggests that dynamic information is unlikely to wholly account for the book preferences observed in the current work, a more careful examination of the respective influence of these dimensions could be attained by better isolating them in books written from scratch.…”

“…Still other work reveals that young children will persist longer at a tedious motor task when rewarded with causally rich rather than minimally causal descriptions of novel objects (Alvarez and Booth, 2014), and tend to favor informants who have a history of providing causal information (Sobel and Corriveau, 2010). Evidence suggests that this interest in causal information is not a mere byproduct of children's interest in discovery generally-speaking, as young children have been shown to prefer causal revelations above and beyond other types of non-obvious information about the world (Alvarez and Booth, 2015).…”

“…Although this body of research compellingly demonstrates children's early attunement to causal information, it is limited by the fact that each contributing study was conducted in a highly contrived context. For example, in Alvarez and Booth (2015), preschoolers were presented with two identical puppets that offered either causally rich or minimally causal descriptions of novel items. When children were asked on each trial to indicate which puppet they would like to learn from, they most often selected the former.…”

Explain This, Explore That: A Study of Parent–Child Interaction in a Children's Museum

“…Questions generated by parents (and the dialog that followed) may give children a more causally rich understanding of gears and thus encourage their persistence in a later solo task. Alvarez and Booth (, ), for example, have suggested that preschoolers engage more in a causally relevant task when given rich rather than weak explanations of causal mechanisms. Similarly, there are numerous benefits of children generating explanations on learning (e.g., Walker, Lombrozo, Williams, Rafferty, & Gopnik, ).…”