Journal
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Volume 42, Issue 2, Pages 491-523Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12509
Keywords
Causal mechanisms; Explanation; Deference; Cognitive Development
Categories
Funding
- NSF [DRL 1561143]
- NIH/NICHHD fellowship [1F32HD089595-01]
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Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on mechanism metadata, information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.
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