{"pk":27766,"title":"Considering alternative facilities anomaly detection in preschoolers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Here we explore whether drawing upon preschooler’s\nintuitive causal reasoning abilities may bolster their attention\nto the presence of conflicting data. Specifically, we examine\nwhether prompting children to think counterfactually about\nalternative outcomes facilitates their anomaly detection in a\ncausal reasoning task. The current task assesses whether\nchildren in two conditions successfully differentiate between\npotential causes: one that accounts for 100% of the data (no\nanomalies), and one that accounts for 75% of the data\n(anomalies observed). Results indicate that counterfactual\nprompts lead 5-year-olds to privilege the hypothesis that\naccounts for more of their observations, and also support\ntransfer of this hypothesis to inform their inferences about\nnovel cases. Findings suggest that counterfactual scaffolds\nmay be beneficial in promoting causal reasoning in children.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Cognitive Development"},{"word":"Casual learning"},{"word":"counterfactuals"},{"word":"scientific reasoning"},{"word":"anomaly detection"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7tc7j6cc","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Jae","middle_name":"","last_name":"Engle","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC San Diego; Scripps","department":""},{"first_name":"Caren","middle_name":"M","last_name":"Walker","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC San Diego","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/27766/galley/17406/download/"}]}