giving the giggles prediction, intervention, and young childrens representation of psychological events让笑声预测、干预和儿童心理活动的表现.pdfVIP

Giving the Giggles: Prediction, Intervention, and Young Children’s Representation of Psychological Events Paul Muentener*, Daniel Friel, Laura Schulz Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America Abstract Adults recognize that if event A predicts event B, intervening on A might generate B. Research suggests that young children have difficulty making this inference unless the events are initiated by goal-directed actions [1]. The current study tested the domain-generality and development of this phenomenon. Replicating previous work, when the events involved a physical outcome, toddlers (mean: 24 months) failed to generalize the outcome of spontaneously occurring predictive events to their own interventions; toddlers did generalize from prediction to intervention when the events involved a psychological outcome. We discuss these findings as they bear on the development of causal concepts. Citation: Muentener P, Friel D, Schulz L (2012) Giving the Giggles: Prediction, Intervention, and Young Children’s Representation of Psychological Events. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42495. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042495 ´ Editor: Tiziana Zalla, Ecole Normale Superieure, France Received April 18, 2012; Accepted July 9, 2012; Published August 20, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Muentener et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (# 12667) and the James S. McDonnell Foundation Causal Learning Collaborative to LS, as well as a National Science Foundation Career Award (# 0744213) to LS. The funders had no role