Leveraging Thinking to Facilitate Causal Learning from Intervention.
Meng Yuan, Fei Xu · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2019
Intervention selection is at once crucial in causal learning andchallenging for causal learners. While the optimal strategy ismaximizing the expected information gain (EIG), both chil-dren and adults often combine it with suboptimal ones suchas the positive test strategy (PTS). In the current study, wesought to facilitate causal learning from intervention by asking5- to 7-year-olds to explain why they chose a certain interven-tion to identify the true structure of a three-node causal sys-tem that might work in one of two ways. Our findings suggestthat while engaging in self-explaining did not help children se-lect more informative interventions, asking them to think abouttheir intervention choices (explaining or reporting) might helpthem better utilize interventional data to infer causal structures.