{"pk":25553,"title":"Probabilistic Versus Heuristic Accounts of Explanation in Children:\nEvidence from a Latent Scope Bias","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Like scientists, children must find ways to explain causal\nsystems in the world. The Bayesian approach to cognitive\ndevelopment holds that children evaluate explanations by\napplying a normative set of statistical learning and\nhypothesis-testing mechanisms to the evidence they\nobserve. Here, we argue for certain supplements to this\napproach. In particular, we demonstrate in two studies that\nchildren, like adults, have a robust latent scope bias that\nconflicts with the laws of probability. When faced with two\nexplanations equally consistent with observed data, where\none explanation made an unverified prediction, children\nconsistently preferred the explanation that did not make\nthis prediction (Experiment 1). The bias can be overridden\nby strong prior odds, indicating that children can integrate\ncues from multiple sources of evidence (Experiment 2). We\nargue that children, like adults, rely on heuristics for\nmaking explanatory judgments which often lead to\nnormative responses, but can lead to systematic error.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Cognitive development; causal reasoning;\nexplanation; evidence; probability; philosophy of science"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/51d3f1f4","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Angie","middle_name":"M","last_name":"Johnston","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yale University","department":""},{"first_name":"Samuel","middle_name":"G.B.","last_name":"Johnson","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yale University","department":""},{"first_name":"Marissa","middle_name":"L","last_name":"Koven","name_suffix":"","institution":"Emory University","department":""},{"first_name":"Frank","middle_name":"C","last_name":"Keil","name_suffix":"","institution":"Yale University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25553/galley/15177/download/"}]}