Abstract
At the core of this chapter is the idea that children are more easily surprised than adults – in part due to their general inexperience with the world and in part due to their innate willingness to question previously held beliefs when compared with their adult counterparts. This latter ability most clearly manifests in the medium of creative inference or abduction. Utilizing Berman and Slobin’s findings, this chapter highlights how children between the ages of three and nine employ a Peircean retroductive model of creative inference when asked to reproduce, in narrative form, the events of a “pictures-only” story. Peirce’s model is “retroductive” insofar as interpreters reason from surprising consequent to antecedent. Results from the reported study indicate that children younger than five were more likely to fabricate events (outside of the core story line) to resolve surprising outcomes taken from the textual images. Beyond the age of five, the child narrators were more likely to use creative abduction to make logical connections between surprising events and provide more coherent narratives. This competence is likely connected with the emergence of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness.
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West, D.E. (2022). Surprise as the Dawning of Abductive Rationality: Evidence from Children’s Narratives. In: Magnani, L. (eds) Handbook of Abductive Cognition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5_19-1
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