Imagine a line of dominoes standing on end, running from one side of the room to the other and under a table in the middle. If the first domino topples, you expect them all to follow, even the ones obscured from view by the table. That logical leap—picturing an unseen chain of cause and effect—sits at the heart of a longstanding puzzle in developmental cognitive science. Historically, study in the field has focused on two distinct areas: causal reasoning (understanding co-occurring causes and effects) and intuitive physics (understanding the mechanisms that underlie how an effect happens from a cause). Both study how children perceive and interpret the world around them.
New research in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab seeks to reconcile these two accounts of causality—the abstract or statistical and the mechanistic—to understand how children make causal judgments. With data collected through Children Helping Science, research scientists in Profs. Laura Schulz’s and Josh Tenenbaum’s groups ask whether children use an innate intuitive physics understanding the way adults do, or if they are somehow utilizing separate systems. Their findings will fuel additional research in SQI’s Development of Intelligent Minds Mission, which draws from both developmental cognitive science and machine learning.
This August, BCS graduate student and lead author Vicente Vivanco will present the paper at the annual Cognitive Science Society conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.