@proceedings{186036,
  author = {Nadya Vasilyeva and Mei Murphy and Oce Bohra and Jenny Chen and Selena Xandra Cuevas and Samhita Katteri and Tania Lombrozo and Alison Gopnik},
  editor = { and  and  and },
  title = {{\textquotedblleft}It Depends{\textquotedblright}: How Children Reason about Stable and Unstable Causes},
  abstract = {<p>Adults have been shown to favor stable causal relationships {\textendash} those that hold robustly across background contexts {\textendash}in their actions and causal/explanatory generalizations (Vasilyeva et al, 2018). Here we explore how this preference develops. We present results from one study with 141 4-7-year-olds investigating whether children pay attention to causal stability when they explain observations and design interventions in novel contexts. We report developmental shifts in reliance on causal stability in a range of inferential tasks, highlight the important role of perceived average causal strength in determining children{\textquoteright}s causal preferences, and discuss the implications of our findings for theories of early causal learning. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the role of stability in children{\textquoteright}s causal reasoning.</p>

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},
  year = {2021},
  journal = {Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society},
  pages = {3169-3170},
  language = {eng},
}