Listening to music activates representations of movement and social agents. Why? We test whether causal reasoning plays a role, and find that from childhood, people can intuitively reason about how musical sounds were generated, inferring the events and agents that caused the sounds. In Experiment 1 (N = 120, pre-registered), 6-year-old children…

Novel causal systems pose a problem of variable choice: How can a reasoner decide which variable is causally relevant? Which variable in the system should a learner manipulate to try to produce a desired, yet unfamiliar, casual outcome? In much causal reasoning research, participants learn how a particular set of preselected variables produce a…

Young children can engage in diagnostic reasoning. However, almost all research demonstrating such capacities has investigated children's inferences when the individual efficacy of each candidate cause is known. Here we show that there is development between ages five and seven in children's ability to reason about the number of candidate causes…

Many researchers have long assumed imaginative play critical to the healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development of children, which has important implications for early-education policy and practice. But, the authors find, a careful review of the existing literature highlights a need for a better theory to clarify the nature of the…

Object use is a ubiquitous characteristic of the human species, and learning how objects function is a fundamental part of development. In this article the authors examine the role that intentionality plays in children's understanding of causal relationships during observational learning of object use. Children observed demonstrations in which…

Preschoolers use information from interventions, namely intentional actions, to make causal inferences. We asked whether children consider some interventions to be more informative than others based on two components of an actor's knowledge state: whether an actor "possesses" causal knowledge, and whether an actor is allowed to "use" their…

The theory that children's development of strategies-of-science experimentation is a consequence of developments in theory of mind was examined with 72 children in grades one, three, and five. Ability to predict, explain, and affect the reasoning of a doll or cartoon character predicted performance in planning controlled experiments and in…

A central theme of research on human development and psychopathology is whether a therapeutic intervention or a turning-point event, such as a family break-up, alters the trajectory of the behavior under study. This paper lays out and applies a method for using observational longitudinal data to make more confident causal inferences about the…