Development
When can children work out a cause they cannot see?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
By age 4, children used the sound a hidden ball made to find it, but only when the sound could plausibly have been caused by the ball, showing they reason about unseen causes rather than just learning associations.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Five experiments: between-subjects causal vs arbitrary event order with identical stimuli (Exp 1), a temporal-proximity control (Exp 2), chimpanzee versions (Exp 3-4), a simpler shaken-boxes task (Exp 4) and a causal-question version for 3-year-olds (Exp 5)
- N
- N=129 · Main Experiment 1: 129 children aged 3-6 (65 causal, 64 arbitrary); Exp 2: 40 children aged 4-5; Exp 4: 48 children aged 3-5 and 11 chimpanzees; Exp 5: 28 3-year-olds; Exp 3: 6 chimpanzees then 11 in a second phase
- Population
- Preschool children aged 3-6 in Scotland; chimpanzees at Leipzig Zoo for the comparative experiments
- Outcome
- Proportion of 20 (or 10) trials on which the hidden ball or reward was found, compared with chance and between conditions; children's verbal explanations
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Key findings
4-year-olds found the ball above chance only in the causal condition and did significantly better there than in the arbitrary condition; 5-year-olds showed a similar non-significant trend, 6-year-olds succeeded in both conditions, and 3-year-olds failed both. With purely arbitrary recorded sounds, the order of sounds made no difference, ruling out a simple timing explanation. Children who explained that the boxes made different sounds performed much better (a proportion correct of 0.77 versus 0.52). Chimpanzees stayed at chance in every version, and 3-year-olds succeeded (0.67 correct) only when asked the causally framed question.
Methodology
Children watched a ball containing a sticker dropped into an opaque forked tube ending in two boxes, and heard either a metallic 'ding' or wooden 'clack'. In the causal condition the sound came after the ball fell, as if made by the ball landing; in the arbitrary condition exactly the same sound came before the drop, so it still predicted the box but could not have been caused by the ball. Follow-ups checked whether the sound's timing alone mattered, tested chimpanzees on the same and simpler tasks, used a simpler shaken-box task, and asked 3-year-olds a causally worded question ('Which box did I shake?').
Limitations
The failures of 3-year-olds and chimpanzees are null results that could reflect working-memory or attention demands of tracking brief sounds rather than an inability to reason causally, as the authors acknowledge. The chimpanzee samples were tiny (6 and 11 animals) and most animals developed side biases, so the comparative conclusions are weak. Age groups within Experiment 1 contained only about 16 children per condition, the 5-year-old difference was not significant, and even successful 4-year-olds were far from ceiling. It is also unclear whether the causal question in Experiment 5 scaffolded reasoning or simply turned the task into sound-to-box matching.
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