Researchers studying intuitive theories have usually tried to discover a typical child’s knowledge of familiar causal generalizations, and to track changes in that knowledge as children grow older. We can ask whether children of a particular age understand important causal relationships within domains such as psychology, biology and physics. But if we want to understand the fundamental mechanisms of causal learning we also need to give children causal problems that they haven’t already solved. So researchers have given children controlled evidence about new causal systems to see what kinds of causal conclusions they will draw.
This structure of intuitive theories illustrates how every child's learning ability is directly affected by both nurture and nature. Learning causality from probability suggests that children are able to learn beyond the immediate consequences of their actions. Children learn from the experiences of others just as much as they learn from first hand experiences and they develop understanding and knowledge from both. Therefore the environments that the children are exposed to can inhibit or prohibit their abilities to learn and how they express common or uncommon characteristics of causality. Casual relations are often conditional probabilities to infer the existence of unobserved causes and variables that could explain evidence that links probabilities.