Thank you and great questions!

There are many factors to consider in a more naturalistic context. For one, children may have many more cues to causality than just the ones we presented in our study – language, spatial relations, etc. However, they may also have many more distractions. Our study demonstrates that causal learning by observation is a robust mechanism by which children can learn inconsistent causal relationships – ones that appear to be effective only some of the time. This is important not only to our understanding of how children learn about cause and effect, a critical STEM concept, but also to our understanding of children’s early intuitions about probabilistic events and likelihoods.

In response to your second question, I don’t know what characteristics may make some children better or worse probabilistic learners, but I do know that our work suggests that it may be possible to introduce probability as a concept earlier in educational curricula than it is at the moment and in a different format, one that might take advantage of these early intuitions.

Thank you Jorge!

Thank you! Research on STEM learning and education emphasizes the importance of children’s acquisition of scientific reasoning skills, such as experimentation, evidence evaluation, and inference. The results of our work could lead researchers to develop curricula and training for preschool and K-3 level teachers to teach probabilities and probabilistic concepts that comport early childhood intuitions and help us to determine how children acquire error-prone heuristics during development. Also, increasing our knowledge about children’s informal statistical learning and causal reasoning can inform us about the background knowledge, acquired in informal settings, that children bring to more formal educational experiences.

Thank you! There were no differences between any subgroups in our sample. However, it could be interesting to run larger samples of specific subgroups, such as groups of different socioeconomic status to see if there are environmental factors critical to the development of this cognitive mechanism. Games such as the one we describe above could be played regularly with children varying the causal objects, desirable outcomes, and the probabilities themselves to help children generalize. And within the context of these games, parents and educators could begin to draw connections to language about probability, such as more likely, less likely and to draw a connection between the games and events in daily life with very young children.

Thank you May! To better recruit a representative sample of participants, we recruit participants through the University of Washington Infant Participant Pool (IPP). IPP participants are recruited from County birth records obtained from Washington State’s Center for Health Statistics/Department of Health. This method of recruitment increases the likelihood of a representative level of diversity in our sample in accordance with the surrounding population. To further ensure a wider diversity of participants, we also include public transit information during our recruitment process and reimburse parents for all transportation costs. However, since environmental factors were not the focus of our study, we did not collect samples from particular subgroups large enough to allow us to make statistical inferences about the effects of those environmental factors. This would be an interesting line of research to pursue in future studies.