@inproceedings{9615f11d919347f495d4bc84b1e6a9b4,
title = "Causal intervention strategies change across adolescence",
abstract = "Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that confirm single hypotheses rather than those that discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative intervention decisions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. We found that the use of discriminatory strategies increased through adolescence and plateaued into adulthood. Our results identify a clear developmental trend in causal reasoning, and highlight the need to expand research on causal learning mechanisms in adolescence.",
keywords = "causal learning, cognitive development, hypothesis testing, information-seeking",
author = "Kate Nussenbaum and Cohen, {Alexandra O.} and Davis, {Zachary J.} and David Halpern and Gureckis, {Todd M.} and Catherine Hartley",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Morgan Glover, Sree Panuganti, Dhiraj Patel, Haniyyah Sardar, Xinxu Shen, and Daphne Valencia for help with data collection. We also thank the Jacobs Foundation (Early Career Fellowship to C.A.H.), the Department of Defense (NDSEG Fellowship to K.N.), the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 1714321 to A.O.C, CAREER grant 1654393 to C.A.H., and CAREER grant BCS-1255538 to T.M.G.), and the James S. McDonnell Foundation (Scholar Award to T.M.G.) for financial support. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019.All rights reserved.; 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019 ; Conference date: 24-07-2019 Through 27-07-2019",
year = "2019",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Creativity + Cognition + Computation, CogSci 2019",
publisher = "The Cognitive Science Society",
pages = "2481--2487",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society",
}