Key Concept: Causality
The concept of causality (i.e., that one action makes another happen) can be discussed in many ways, from more concrete to more abstract. Clearly, for young children, as Hatano would have said, the concrete may be the first and is certainly the easier, more tangible way to understand any concept. This notion is also consistent with Piaget, who explored causality extensively.
One way to look at causality concretely is to focus on the physical world instead of the psychological or scientific worlds. For example, if I push a pencil on a table, it will likely roll off the edge of the table. So, the physical force I exerted on the pencil caused it to move.
Western psychologists (as reported in Siegler and Alibali, 2019) have investigated pre-verbal infants’ understanding of physical cause in the context of moving objects like this. In one particular experiment, the researchers (Oakes & Cohen, 1995; see Siegler and Alibali, 2019 for a discussion) show six to 10 month-olds a stationary object being hit by another object moving towards it, striking it. There are two different outcomes that follow this collision, each depicted in the video below (NB: this is not the same video shown to the infants in the study, but it approximates what the infants would have been shown).
Video: Causation (duration: 0:32)
Did both of these videos make sense to you?
In the experiment, the seven- month-olds became habituated to the example where the car moves due to being hit by the other car (labelled “Case 1”). But, when they were shown the second video (labelled “Case 2”), where the second car does not move, they dishabituated (Oakes & Cohen, 1995).
This means the infants noticed the difference between the causal relationship of the movement and the two cars and when that causal relationship was removed. The researchers inferred from this recognition of the two types of movement (causal and non-causal) that the seven-month-olds had knowledge about how the physical world works. This type of interpretation has big implications when we think about things that infants learn or are born with or things that are universal or not. But we should also consider the laboratory nature of such research and ask ourselves, “What do we learn from this study?” and “What does it mean?”
Outside the laboratory, we often see children needing to understand causation or causality when interpreting a story plot. Consider preschoolers following along in a picture book and needing to understand that a character has made a mistake that will cause a problem for another character. This type of knowledge is much more complex and contextualized than watching toy cars hit one another, and for that reason, it relates not only to causality but to other areas of thinking (notably social cognition, which we will revisit in Chapter 7).
Eastern Perspectives
Shunhua and Tanlong (2023) investigated the understanding of cause and effect in storytelling among Chinese preschoolers. For their study, they used a wordless picture book, and they had preschoolers in three age groups generate their own story while looking at the picture book (groups included children aged two to three, three to four, four to five and five to six).
While the big idea of their research was that children’s story structures were more complex with age, they also identified an interesting theory about young children’s understanding of cause and effect. They coded the children’s stories for what they describe as “macrostructure” features, which included background, cause, action, reaction, and result. Older children were better able to understand cause in the story as expressed by the characters’ actions thanthe young two to three year-olds who had almost no understanding of cause in the story. Indeed, the authors tested for causal understanding using a separate measure and found a significant difference related to age.
But, the authors also consider the cultural role that storytelling has potentially played in their development of this conceptual understanding. They discuss the importance of storytelling to understanding the broader world, such as how folk tales are typically used to teach cultural values such as “collectivism, hierarchical relationships and the importance of harmony” (Shunhua & Tanlong, 2023, p. 16). Stories are very important in Chinese culture, and the authors argue that through their structural features and socialization content, children are gaining conceptual understandings.
Concepts and Representational Thinking
This chapter explored only some examples of the kinds of organizing ideas young children engage with and some of the ways in which this engagement happens. Conceptual development is a very big topic that addresses the abstract ideas we as humans possess about the world in which we live. It encompasses cultural interpretations of science, story, meaning, and the natural world.
It is important to think about how young children are not always looking at the concrete world and that we engage them through conversation, play, day-to-day tasks, and storytelling in representational thinking. The concepts that young children learn then become abstract ideas that can be used for other tasks, notably problem-solving. Some have proposed that problem-solving is the manipulation and use of concepts, so our discussion of concepts does not end here but will be picked up again in this text, particularly in Chapter 6 on Problem-Solving.
