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1. Relations Between Executive Functions and Causal Reasoning in Young Children

   https://doi.org/10.3102/1315192  

   Bauer, Jessie-Raye ; Booth, Amy E. ( April 2018 , AERA)

   Despite the early development of causal reasoning (CR), and its potential for shaping scientific literacy, we have little understanding of its structural origins. Specifically, is CR a unique capability that develops relatively independently or is it largely dependent on broader, more fundamental, cognitive abilities? Executive Functioning (EF) is an especially promising contributor to CR based on its already established role in related skills like planning and problem solving (e.g., Diamond, 2013). To begin exploring this potential relationship, we assessed 123 three (Mage = 3.42 years) and 64 five year olds’ (Mage = 5.36 years) performance on two CR tasks (counterfactual reasoning and causal inference), each of which we expected might be influenced in different ways by distinct EF skills. The counterfactual reasoning task (Guajardo & Turley-Ames, 2004) required children to generate alternative courses of action that would lead to different outcomes in fictional vignettes. The causal inference task (Das Gupta & Bryant, 1989) required children to compare pictures taken before and after a transformation (e.g., broken flowerpot and intact flowerpot) and to select a tool (e.g., glue) that could have caused it. We measured EF with three tasks: flanker (inhibition), count and label (working memory), and dimensional change card sort (cognitive flexibility). Finally, we measured children’s vocabulary and processing speed. To explore the relationship between EF and CR, we conducted a series of four linear regressions predicting causal inference and counterfactual reasoning ability in 3 and 5 year olds. Of all our measures, only vocabulary and inhibitory control emerged as significant predictors of causal inference ability for both 3 (βvocab = .04, p = .002, and βinhib = .04, p = .04) and 5 year olds (βvocab = .03, p = .01, and βinhib = .02, p = .04). Similarly, inhibitory control emerged as the only significant predictor of counterfactual reasoning in 3 year olds, βinhib = .03, p = .03. In contrast, for 5 year olds, working memory was the only significantly predictor of counterfactual reasoning, βWM = .71, p = .02. These results suggest that causal inference skills are stably supported by inhibitory control throughout early childhood. The story for counterfactual reasoning, however, appears to be somewhat more complex. Consistent with previous work (Beck, Riggs & Gorniak, 2009), inhibitory control supported counterfactual reasoning ability in our 3-year-old sample. However, inhibitory control did not significantly predict counterfactual reasoning in 5 year olds, it was supported by working memory instead. One explanation for this difference might have to do with the sophistication of children’s counterfactual reasoning skills at these different ages. Taken together, these results suggest that CR does not develop as a unique capacity, but instead likely relies on EFs that influence different CR skills in distinct ways across development. This represents an initial step in understanding early CR skills, which are promising contributors to emerging scientific literacy. 

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2. Measuring Emerging Number Knowledge in Toddlers

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.703598  

   Silver, Alex M. ; Elliott, Leanne ; Braham, Emily J. ; Bachman, Heather J. ; Votruba-Drzal, Elizabeth ; Tamis-LeMonda, Catherine S. ; Cabrera, Natasha ; Libertus, Melissa E. ( July 2021 , Frontiers in Psychology)

   null (Ed.)

   Recent evidence suggests that infants and toddlers may recognize counting as numerically relevant long before they are able to count or understand the cardinal meaning of number words. The Give-N task, which asks children to produce sets of objects in different quantities, is commonly used to test children’s cardinal number knowledge and understanding of exact number words but does not capture children’s preliminary understanding of number words and is difficult to administer remotely. Here, we asked whether toddlers correctly map number words to the referred quantities in a two-alternative forced choice Point-to-X task (e.g., “Which has three?”). Two- to three-year-old toddlers ( N = 100) completed a Give-N task and a Point-to-X task through in-person testing or online via videoconferencing software. Across number-word trials in Point-to-X, toddlers pointed to the correct image more often than predicted by chance, indicating that they had some understanding of the prompted number word that allowed them to rule out incorrect responses, despite limited understanding of exact cardinal values. No differences in Point-to-X performance were seen for children tested in-person versus remotely. Children with better understanding of exact number words as indicated on the Give-N task also answered more trials correctly in Point-to-X. Critically, in-depth analyses of Point-to-X performance for children who were identified as 1- or 2-knowers on Give-N showed that 1-knowers do not show a preliminary understanding of numbers above their knower-level, whereas 2-knowers do. As researchers move to administering assessments remotely, the Point-to-X task promises to be an easy-to-administer alternative to Give-N for measuring children’s emerging number knowledge and capturing nuances in children’s number-word knowledge that Give-N may miss. 

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3. What Could Go Wrong: Adults and Children Calibrate Predictions and Explanations of Others' Actions Based on Relative Reward and Danger

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13163  

   Gjata, Nensi N. ; Ullman, Tomer D. ; Spelke, Elizabeth S. ; Liu, Shari ( June 2022 , Cognitive Science)

   When human adults make decisions (e.g., wearing a seat belt), we often consider the negative consequences that would ensue if our actions were to fail, even if we have never experienced such a failure. Do the same considerations guide our understanding of other people's decisions? In this paper, we investigated whether adults, who have many years of experience making such decisions, and 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children, who have less experience and are demonstrably worse at judging the consequences of their own actions, conceive others' actions as motivated both by reward (how good reaching one's intended goal would be), and by what we call “danger” (how badly one's action could end). In two pre‐registered experiments, we tested whether adults and 6‐ and 7‐year‐old children tailor their predictions and explanations of an agent's action choices to the specific degree of danger and reward entailed by each action. Across four different tasks, we found that children and adults expected others to negatively appraise dangerous situations and minimize the danger of their actions. Children's and adults' judgments varied systematically in accord with both the degree of danger the agent faced and the value the agent placed on the goal state it aimed to achieve. However, children did not calibrate their inferences abouthow muchan agent valued the goal state of a successful action in accord with the degree of danger the action entailed, and adults calibrated these inferences more weakly than inferences concerning the agent's future action choices. These results suggest that from childhood, people use a degree of danger and reward to make quantitative, fine‐grained explanations and predictions about other people's behavior, consistent with computational models on theory of mind that contain continuous representations of other agents' action plans.

    

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4. Young children’s ability to make predictions about novel illnesses

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13655  

   DeJesus, Jasmine M. ; Venkatesh, Shruthi ; Kinzler, Katherine D. ( August 2021 , Child Development)

   Understanding disease transmission is a complex problem highlighted by the COVID‐19 pandemic. These studies test whether 3‐ to 6‐year‐old children in the United States use information about social interactions to predict disease transmission. Before and during COVID‐19, children predicted illness would spread through close interactions. Older children outperformed younger children with no associations between task performance and pandemic experience. Children did not predict that being hungry or tired would similarly spread through close interactions. Participants include 196 three‐ to six‐year‐olds (53% girls, 47% boys; 68% White, 9% Black, 7% Asian, 6% Hispanic or Latinx), with medium‐sized effects (d = .6, = .3). These findings suggest that thinking about social interaction supports young children's predictions about illness, with noted limitations regarding children's real‐world avoidance of disease‐spreading behaviors.

    

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5. Counting and the ontogenetic origins of exact equality

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104952  

   Schneider, R. M. ( January 2022 , Cognition)

   Humans are unique in their capacity to both represent number exactly and to express these representations symbolically. This correlation has prompted debate regarding whether symbolic number systems are necessary to represent large exact number. Previous work addressing this question in innumerate adults and semi-numerate children has been limited by conflicting results and differing methodologies, and has not yielded a clear answer. We address this debate by adapting methods used with innumerate populations (a “set-matching” task) for 3- to 5-year-old US children at varying stages of symbolic number acquisition. In five studies we find that children’s ability to match sets exactly is related not simply to knowing the meanings of a few number words, but also to understanding how counting is used to generate sets (i.e., the cardinal principle). However, while children were more likely to match sets after acquiring the cardinal principle, they nevertheless demonstrated failures, compatible with the hypothesis that the ability to reason about exact equality emerges sometime later. These findings provide important data on the origin of exact number concepts, and point to knowledge of a counting system, rather than number language in general, as a key ingredient in the ability to reason about large exact number. 

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