Better all by myself: Gaining personal experience, not watching others, improves 3-year-olds’ performance in a causal trap-task (dataset)

Children often learn from others’ demonstrations, but in the causal domain, evidence acquired from observing others may be more ambiguous than evidence generated for oneself. Prior work involving tool-using tasks suggests that observational learning may not provide sufficient information about the causal relations involved, but it remains unclear whether these limitations can by mitigated by providing demonstrations using familiar manual actions rather than unfamiliar tools. We provided 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children (n = 67) with the opportunity to acquire experience with a causal trap-task by hand or by tool, actively or from observing others. Initially, children either generated their own experience or watched a yoked demonstration; all children then attempted the trap-task with the tool. Older children who generated their own experience outperformed those who watched demonstrations, whereas younger children performed at chance in all conditions. Though hand- or tool-use had no effect on performance with a tool, older children in the Self–Hand condition perseverated less during initial practice than their peers in Self–Tool. The implications of these findings for scaffolding self-guided learning and for demonstrations involving errors are discussed.<br>