The Influence of Children?S First Action When Learning Causal Structure from Exploratory Play

Young children have a nascent capacity to understand how to control variables to uncover causal structure. However, they do not always explore their environment in a way that generates appropriate data for causal learning. Here, we consider a potential reason that children do not explore systematically: whether the nature of their first action influences their subsequent play. Four- to 7-year-olds (N = 105) saw ambiguous data about a novel causal system and were then allowed to explore this system through play. The nature of their first action - specifically whether it varied only one potential cause and whether it was efficacious - affected their subsequent exploration, particularly whether they generated the data necessary to learn the causal structure. But generating these data, independent of their first action, related to whether they disambiguated the data they had initially observed. These results suggest that the extent to which children can learn from their own exploration in play might depend on how that play unfolds.