Young children’s causal explanations are biased by post-action associative information.

Abstract

In a series of 4 experiments, we tested children's understanding that the causes of their actions must necessarily be attributed to information known prior to (i.e., "pre-action" information), rather than after (i.e., "post-action" information), the completion of their actions. For example, children were shown a dog, asked to get some cheese to feed the dog, and then returned to discover a mouse. In Experiment 1, the majority of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds claimed that they had gotten the cheese to feed the mouse. In Experiments 2 and 3, we ruled out the possibilities that (1) children had forgotten the critical "pre-action" information (e.g., "dog"), and (2) children had merely attributed the cause of their action to the most recent item (e.g., "dog") that they had seen. Finally, in Experiment 4, we determined that 7-year-olds, but not 6-year-olds, correctly attributed the cause of their action to the pre-action information, suggesting that this is the age at which children are no longer influenced by associative post-action information when explaining the causes of their actions. These results are discussed in terms of their relevance for causal reasoning, action explanation, and memory.

The Role of Association in Pre-schoolers’ Solutions to “Spoon Tests” of Future Planning

“…However, in Experiment 3, almost all children (including those that went on to choose the wrong token) answered the memory question correctly. This result is consistent with other findings that suggest episodic memory at age 4 is fragile and can be disrupted by intervening semantic or associative information if it is in conflict with the past reality [24,25]. Our suggestion is therefore that children could in principle have remembered the identity of the box in Experiment 1 before they chose the token; however, whether they actually remembered correctly and then nevertheless chose at chance (which, in turn, corrupted their answer to the memory question), or they simply failed to try to remember the identity of the box at all, is a question for future work.…”