Cognitive Development 24 (2009) 70–79 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognitive Development Short report Rationales in children’s causal learning from others’ actions David M. Sobel a,* , Jessica A. Sommerville b a Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Box 1978, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, United States b Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, Campus Box 351525, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States article info Keywords: Causal learning Explanations Rationales abstract Shown commensurate actions and information by an adult, preschoolers’ causal learning was influenced by the pedagogical context in which these actions occurred. Four-year-olds who were provided with a reason for an experimenter’s action relevant to learning causal structure showed more accurate causal learning than children exposed to the same action and data accompanied by an inappropriate rationale or accompanied by no explanatory information. These results suggest that children’s accurate causal learning is influenced by contextual factors that specify the instruc- tional value of others’ actions. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. By the time children enter elementary school, they recognize fundamental aspects of causal struc- ture in the physical world (Baillargeon, 2002; Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, & Jacobson, 1992). They understand that animate objects differ from inanimate objects in terms of various biological princi- ples (Inagaki & Hatano, 1993; Kalish, 1996) and that an agent’s behaviors are motivated by underlying mental states (Perner, 1991; Wellman, 1990). Young children also have sophisticated causal reasoning abilities. They can make predictions about future events (Bullock, Gelman, & Baillargeon, 1982), gen- erate explanations of past events (Schult & Wellman, 1997; Wellman & Liu, 2007), and reason about counterfactuals (Harris, German, & Mills, 1996). Open questions concern how young children acquire their causal knowledge and the extent of their causal reasoning abilities. One approach to these questions has been to investigate children’s ability to recover causal structure from their observation of events, particularly events that convey conditional probability information. To use a simple example, two events may co-occur because of a causal relation between them or because of a hidden common cause (among other reasons). To decide between these possibilities, one can observe the conditional probability that these events co-occur given the presence or absence of * Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 401 863 3038; fax: +1 401 863 2255. E-mail address: Dave Sobel@brown.edu (D.M. Sobel). 0885-2014/$ – see front matter © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2008.08.003