Preschool Children's Assumptions about Cause and Effect: Temporal Ordering

BULLOCK, MERRY, and GELMAN, ROCHEL. Preschool Children's Assumptions about Cause and Effect: Temporal Ordering. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1979, 50, 89-96. Preschool-aged children have been characterized as lacking an assumption that causes only precede or co-occur with effects. However, when 3-5-year-olds were shown a simple sequence of mechanical events in which 1 potential cause preceded and another followed an effect, they picked the first event as a cause. Further experimental trials indicated that order is dominant over other causal cues. A comparison of nonverbal and verbal responses revealed that, while children as young as 3 years behave as though they use an assumption of unidirectional order in reasoning about causality, it is only the older children who show some ability to articulate this belief.