{"pk":28676,"title":"Observing child-led exploration improves parents’ causal inferences","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Do children’s flexible causal inferences promote more cre-ative causal discovery for observing adults? Inspired by a taskin which children are more likely to consider unconventionalcausal forms (Lucas, Bridgers, Griffiths, & Gopnik, 2014;Wente et al., 2019), we designed a new method in which child-adult pairs work together to solve a causal task and assessedthe relative influence of each member of the pair on the other’scausal inference. Consistent with previous research, childrenwere better than parents at learning the unusual conjunctive re-lationship, suggesting that children make more flexible causalinferences than adults. Our research also revealed a surpris-ing and new result – that observing a child explore broadlyhelped parents to be more flexible and open-minded in theircausal learning. In contrast, a child observing an adult’s ex-ploratory interventions had no negative consequence on thechild’s ability to infer the correct relation. Follow-up exper-iments explored the degree to which this child-led bootstrap-ping for adults was due to the particular exploratory evidencegenerated by the child during play, or merely the presence ofa child. Results suggest that both factors may play a role inshaping adult’s causal inferences.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"causality"},{"word":"Cognitive Development"},{"word":"parent-child in-teraction"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/61h741kp","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Koeun","middle_name":"","last_name":"Choi","name_suffix":"","institution":"Virginia Tech","department":""},{"first_name":"Milagros","middle_name":"","last_name":"Grados","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""},{"first_name":"Elizabeth","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bonawitz","name_suffix":"","institution":"Rutgers University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2019-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28676/galley/18547/download/"}]}