This paper considers how 5- to 11-year-olds’ verbal reasoning about the causality underlying extended, dynamic natural processes links to various facets of their statistical thinking. Such continuous processes typically do not provide perceptually distinct causes and effect, and previous work suggests that spatial–temporal analysis, the ability to analyze spatial configurations that change over time, is a crucial predictor of reasoning about causal mechanism in such situations. Work in the Humean tradition to causality has long emphasized on the importance of statistical (...) thinking for inferring causal links between distinct cause and effect events, but here we assess whether this is also viable for causal thinking about continuous processes. Controlling for verbal and non-verbal ability, two studies administered a battery of covariation, probability, spatial–temporal, and causal measures. Results indicated that spatial–temporal analysis was the best predictor of causal thinking across both studies, but statistical thinking supported and informed spatial–temporal analysis: covariation assessment potentially assists with the identification of variables, while simple probability judgment potentially assists with thinking about unseen mechanisms. We conclude that the ability to find out patterns in data is even more widely important for causal analysis than commonly assumed, from childhood, having a role to play not just when causally linking already distinct events but also when analyzing the causal process underlying extended dynamic events without perceptually distinct components. (shrink)

To what extent general intelligence mechanisms are associated with causal thinking is unclear. There has been little work done experimentally to determine which developing cognitive capacities help to integrate causal knowledge into explicit systems. To investigate this neglected aspect of development, 138 children aged 5–11 studying at mainstream primary schools completed a battery of three intelligence tests: one investigating verbal ability, another looking at verbal analogical, and a third assessing non-verbal/fluid reasoning. Children were also interviewed over the course of three (...) causal tasks, with the results showing that the developmental paths exhibited uneven profiles across the three causal phenomena. Children consistently found that explaining solution, where substances disappeared toward the end of the process, was more challenging. The confirmatory factor analyses suggested that the impact of cognitive ability factor in explicitly identifying causal relations was large. The proportion of the direct effect of general intelligence was 66% and it subsumed the variances of both verbal measures. Of this, 37% was the indirect effect of age. Fluid reasoning explained a further 28% of the variance, playing a unique role in causal explanation. The results suggested that, overall, cognitive abilities are substantially related to causal reasoning, but not entirely due to developmental differences in “g” during the age periods studied. (shrink)