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How children map causal verbs to different causes across development

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Although collision-like causes are fundamental in philosophical and psychological theories of causation, humans conceptualize many events as causes that lack direct contact. Here we argue that how people think and talk about different causes is deeply connected, and investigate how children learn this mapping. If Andy hits Suzy with his bike, Suzy falls into a fence and it breaks, Andy ‘caused’ the fence to break but Suzy ‘broke’ it. If Suzy forgets sunscreen and gets sunburned, the absence of sunscreen ‘caused’ Suzy’s sunburn, but the sun ‘burned’ her skin. We tested 691 children and 270 adults. Four-year-old children mapped ‘caused’ to distal causes and ‘broke’ to proximal causes (Experiment 1). Although 4-year-old children did not map ‘caused’ to absences until later (Experiment 2), they already referred to absences when asked ‘why’ an outcome occurred (Experiment 3). Our findings highlight the role of semantics and pragmatics in developing these mappings.

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Fig. 1: Experiment overview.
Fig. 2: Experiment 1.
Fig. 3: Experiment 2.
Fig. 4: Experiment 3.
Fig. 5: Rational Speech Act (RSA) model.

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Data availability

All data are available on GitHub at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17572955 (ref. 86).

Code availability

All code is available on GitHub at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17572955 (ref. 86).

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Acknowledgements

We thank members of the Causality in Cognition Lab and the Markman Lab for feedback, as well as E. Bonawitz, E. Clark, H. Clark, M. Frank, N. Goodman, J. Kominsky, B. Levin and M. Srinivasan for helpful discussion. T.G. was supported by grants from Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence institute (HAI) and Cooperative AI. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    David Rose, Ellen M. Markman & Tobias Gerstenberg

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Siying Zhang

  3. Department of Philosophy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Shaun Nichols

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  1. David Rose
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Contributions

D.R., S.Z., S.N., E.M.M. and T.G. conceptualized the project and designed the methodology. D.R. S.Z. and T.G. developed software. D.R. and T.G. performed validation and conducted formal analysis. D.R. and S.Z. conducted investigation and curated data. D.R. wrote the original manuscript draft. D.R., S.N., E.M.M. and T.G. reviewed and edited the manuscript. D.R. and T.G. performed visualization. D.R., E.M.M. and T.G. supervised and administered the project. E.M.M. and T.G. acquired funding.

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Correspondence to David Rose.

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Rose, D., Zhang, S., Nichols, S. et al. How children map causal verbs to different causes across development. Nat Hum Behav (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02345-9

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