Can 1- and 2-year-old toddlers learn causal action sequences?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Toddlers can learn cause-effect relationships between single actions and outcomes. However, real-world causality is often more complex. We investigated whether toddlers (12- to 35-month-olds) can learn that a sequence of two actions is causally necessary, from observing the actions of an adult demonstrator. In Experiment 1, toddlers saw evidence that performing a two-action sequence (AB) on a puzzle-box was necessary to produce a sticker, and evidence that B alone was not sufficient. Toddlers were then given the opportunity to interact with the box and retrieve up to five stickers. Toddlers had difficulty reproducing the required two-action sequence, with the ability to do so improving with age. In Experiment 2, toddlers saw evidence that performing a single action (B) was sufficient to produce an effect (i.e., a sequence was not causally necessary). Toddlers were more successful and performed fewer sequences in Experiment 2, suggesting some sensitivity to the sequential causal structure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".