@article {2740,
	title = {The invisible hand: Toddlers connect probabilistic events with agentive causes},
	journal = {Cognitive Science},
	volume = {40},
	year = {2016},
	pages = {23},
	chapter = {1854},
	abstract = {<p>Children posit unobserved causes when events appear to occur spontaneously (e.g., Gelman \&amp; Gottfried, 1996).\&nbsp; What about when events appear to occur probabilistically? Here toddlers (mean: 20.1 months) saw arbitrary causal relationships (Cause A generated Effect A; Cause B generated Effect B) in a fixed, alternating order. The relationships were then changed in one of two ways.\&nbsp; In the Deterministic condition, the event order changed (Event B preceded Event A); in the Probabilistic condition, the causal relationships changed (Cause A generated Effect B; Cause B generated Effect A). As intended, toddlers looked equally long at both changes (Experiment 1). We then introduced a previously unseen candidate cause.\&nbsp; Toddlers looked longer at the appearance of a hand (Experiment 2) and novel agent (Experiment 3) in the Deterministic than the Probabilistic conditions, but looked equally long at novel non-agents (Experiment 4), suggesting that by two, toddlers connect probabilistic events with unobserved agents.</p>
},
	author = {Wu, Yang and Muentener, Paul and Laura Schulz}
}
