Frank C. Keil:

Well before they begin schooling, children are driven to look beyond the obvious. They spontaneously explore and uncover hidden parts that provide pleasing insights into the underlying causal machinery governing their visible properties and behavior. This is where some of the most striking development can occur and where guidance by knowledgeable adults may be most powerful.

But today, children are increasingly confined to considering the surfaces of things and their uses or functions. Information that was easily available a few decades ago has largely evaporated, with no other, deeper webs of information becoming available. It would be remarkable if such dramatic changes in children’s exposure to the underlying architectures of devices had no downstream effects on how they think about causal relationships in the world around them. Our job is to understand whether such effects are likely to be negative, positive, or largely inconsequential.