三至六歲幼兒的因果思考：法則推理

Young Children's Causal Thinking: Rule Reasoning

為了深入瞭解學前幼兒的因果思考能力，以澄清近年來發展心理學研究的疑點，本研究以物理因果之「法則推理」為焦點，調整國外研究設計（斜坡－彈珠裝置），擴展研究向度（含「法則的歸納」與「法則的應用」二向度），追蹤80名3～6歲幼兒的因果推理。此外，為了瞭解法則推理能力是否具有跨領域的關聯性，另以「心智理論」作業，進行相關分析。結果發現：（1）3歲幼兒已能從系列線索中，歸納因果法則，並能依據特定法則，預測一系列的相關效應，其已能處理if-then的條件推理，並呈現逐年提昇一個階層的發展趨勢，及至5歲，幼兒已能有效運思if-if-if-then的階層性法則；（2）法則推理具有跨領域的關聯性，唯隨著推理內涵的不同，其相關頗有變異。其中，if-then層次的「法則的歸納」比「法則的應用」更具有跨領域的相關。

Aiming at understanding young children's causal thinking in order to clarify the current issues of developmental psychology, this study traced 80 young children's causal inference focusing on the rule reasoning of physical causality. Researcher modified the current design (the marble-ramp apparatus) and extended the dimensions of research including generating and using of rules. Besides, to understand whether rule reasoning possesses the generality cross domains, researcher employed children's theory of mind and made correlative analysis. Results revealed that: (1) 3-year-olds could already draw causal conclusion from evident clues and make prediction for relative effects by using specific rules. In addition, they employed if-then conditional reasoning and showed their breakthrough with the growing of their age. Around 5 years, young children were able to employ the if-if-if-then hierarchical rule effectively. (2) Rule reasoning seemed to have the generality cross domains. However, the correlations varied in different dimensions. Besides, rather than using rules, generating rules in the level of if-then, had stronger positive correlation between performance on theory-of-mind and on physical causality tasks.