When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships.

•We tested children’s and adults' ability to acquire abstract causal knowledge.•Participants saw and generalized from evidence consistent with 1 of 2 relationships.•Children efficiently learn abstract properties of causal relationships.•Children generalized better than adults when faced with an atypical relationship.•Our results match the predictions of a hierarchical Bayesian model.