Journal
COGNITION
Volume 133, Issue 2, Pages 343-357Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.07.008
Keywords
Explanation; Causal reasoning; Category labels; Non-obvious properties; Inductive inference; Generalization
Categories
Funding
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/I005455/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- ESRC [ES/I005455/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Division Of Research On Learning
- Direct For Education and Human Resources [1056712, 1113648] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Four experiments with preschool-aged children test the hypothesis that engaging in explanation promotes inductive reasoning on the basis of shared causal properties as opposed to salient (but superficial) perceptual properties. In Experiments 1a and 1b, 3- to 5-year-old children prompted to explain during a causal learning task were more likely to override a tendency to generalize according to perceptual similarity and instead extend an internal feature to an object that shared a causal property. Experiment 2 replicated this effect of explanation in a case of label extension (i.e., categorization). Experiment 3 demonstrated that explanation improves memory for clusters of causally relevant (non-perceptual) features, but impairs memory for superficial (perceptual) features, providing evidence that effects of explanation are selective in scope and apply to memory as well as inference. In sum, our data support the proposal that engaging in explanation influences children's reasoning by privileging inductively rich, causal properties. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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