Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers

By David M. Sobel, Josh Tenenbaum, Alison Gopnik. Cognitive Sciences, 2004

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3675e36f8c8c69234c1252bdb4928af18e804815

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Two proposals for causal grammars (2007, background): “These two assumptions are equivalent to the “activation law” of Sobel et al. 2004): a blicket detector will be active if and only if one or more blickets are in contact with it.”
Explanation and understanding (2015, background): “Not only adults but also young children use such strategies to infer causal relations (Gopnik & Glymour 2004, Sobel et al. 2004).”
Reconstructing constructivism: Causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms and the theory theory (2012, unknown): “To begin with, Xu and Garcia (2009) demonstrated that 9-month-olds were sensitive to sampling patterns.”
Where science starts: spontaneous experiments in preschoolers' exploratory play. (2011, unknown): “Thus despite evidence for the sophistication of children’s causal reasoning, previous work falls short of suggesting that children design interventions that respect principles of experimental design: children might both learn from informative evidence (Gopnik et al., 2001; Schulz & Gopnik, 2004; Sch”
Troubles with Bayesianism: An introduction to the psychological immune system (2018, background): “The reliance on prediction allows Bayesians to explain lots of instances of failures to learn that Associationists and Behaviorists could not (see, e.g., Bayesian explanation of Kamin blocking (Sobel et al., 2004).”
Theory-based causal induction. (2009, background): “These two assumptions make this the deterministic detector theory, embodying a simple activation law (Sobel et al., 2004): Only blickets can activate the blicket detector, and they always do so.”