The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map ” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism.

Five studies investigated (a) children’s ability to use the dependent and independent probabilities of events to make causal inferences and (b) the interaction between such inferences and domain-specific knowledge. In Experiment 1, preschoolers used patterns of dependence and independence to make accurate causal inferences in the domains of biology and psychology. Experiment 2 replicated the results in the domain of biology with a more complex pattern of conditional dependencies. In Experiment 3, children used evidence about patterns of dependence and independence to craft novel interventions across domains. In Experiments 4 and 5, children’s sensitivity to patterns of dependence was pitted against their domain-specific knowledge. Children used conditional probabilities to make accurate causal inferences even when asked to violate domain boundaries. The past two decades of research have demonstrated that young children understand cause and effect in a wide range of contexts. By the age of 4, children’s folk physics includes knowledge about the causal relationship between object properties and object motion

Causal learning requires integrating constraints provided by domain-specific theories with domaingeneral statistical learning. In order to investigate the interaction between these factors, the authors presented preschoolers with stories pitting their existing theories against statistical evidence. Each child heard 2 stories in which 2 candidate causes co-occurred with an effect. Evidence was presented in the

The critical thinking movement, it is suggested, has much to gain from conceptualizing its subject matter in a developmental frame-work. Most instructional programs designed to teach critical thinking do not draw on contemporary empirical research in cog-nitive development as a potential resource. The developmental model of critical thinking outlined here derives from contemporary empirical research on directions and processes of intellectual de-velopment in children and adolescents. It identifies three forms of second-order cognition (meta-knowing)--metacognitive, metas-trategic, and epistemological--that constitute an essential part of what develops cognitively to make critical thinking possible. E Educational Researcher, Vol. 28, No. 2, pp. 16-26, 46 nthusiasm for critical thinking as a goal of education shows no signs of waning. Pluralist conceptions of

The “less is more ” hypothesis suggests that one reason adults and children differ in their language acquisition abilities is that they also differ in other cognitive capacities. According to one version, children’s relatively poor memory may make them more likely to over-regularize inconsistent input (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005, 2009). This paper investigates this hypothesis experimentally and computationally. Experiments in which adults were placed under a high cognitive load during a language-learning task reveal that in adults, increased load does not result in increased over-regularization. A computational model offers a possible explanation for these results, demonstrating that over-regularization should occur only in the presence of memory limitations as well as a strong prior bias for over-regularization. Taken together, these findings suggest that the difference in over-regularization between adults and children may not be attributable solely to differences in memory capacity between the two groups.