One- and two-year-olds grasp that causes must precede their effects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowing the temporal direction of causal relations is critical for producing desired outcomes and explaining events. Existing evidence suggests that children start to grasp that causes must precede their effects (the temporal priority principle) by age three; however, whether younger children also understand this has, to our knowledge, not previously been tested. Given the importance of temporal priority in making sense of the world, we explored when knowledge of this principle develops. In the present study, conducted in a lab or museum in a Canadian city, one- and two-year-old children observed an adult perform action A on a puzzle-box (e.g., spinning a dial), following which an effect E occurred (a sticker was dispensed), following which the adult performed action B (e.g., pushing a button; A-E-B sequence). In line with the temporal priority principle, toddlers were significantly more likely to manipulate A than B (Experiment 1, N=41, 22 female), even when A was spatially disconnected from the sticker dispenser and further from it than action B (Experiment 2, N=42, 25 female). In Experiment 3 (N=50, 25 female) toddlers observed an A-B-E sequence such that both actions A and B were performed prior to effect E. Here, they primarily intervened on B, which ruled out that success in Experiments 1—2 was based on a primacy effect. A lack of any age effects across experiments suggests that within the second year of life, children already grasp that causes must precede their effects, providing key insights into causal reasoning in early childhood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
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".