Do six-month-old infants perceive causality?

Abstract

The idea of cause and effect is often assumed to originate in prolonged learning. However, the present findings suggest that 27-week-old infants may already perceive a cause-effect relationship. Reversal of an apparently causal event (direct launching) produced more recovery of attention following habituation than the reversal of a similar but apparently non-causal event (delayed reaction). In both cases the changes in the spatiotemporal properties of the stimuli were identical. Hence the infant's percept of direct launching may involve more than an encoding of its spatiotemporal properties. Since the same kind of stimulus gives rise to a causal illusion in adults, it may be that the additional factor at work is the perception of a causal relationship. This finding may be significant in terms of the modularity of the infant visual system and the later development of causal understanding.The idea of cause and effect lies at the heart of both commonsense and scientific thought. The question of its origins in psychological development has long been a topic of speculation (e.g.

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

“…A large body of work indicates that prelinguistic infants and toddlers can identify thematic role related concepts. Causality (Leslie & Keeble, 1987) and intentionality (Behne, Carpenter & Tomasello, 2005) are useful for identifying agents, object motion (Spelke, 1990) is useful for themes, and goaldirected behaviour (Woodward, 1998) signals locations. Even syntactic bootstrapping studies, which are often used to emphasise the difficulty in inferring meaning situationally, provide some evidence for the ability to infer relational meaning such as thematic roles, otherwise children would not be able to look appropriately at a matching causative or non-causative video even for familiar verbs.…”

Linking Language and Events: Spatiotemporal Cues Drive Children’s Expectations About the Meanings of Novel Transitive Verbs

“…For instance, although there are no familiar content words in the sentence The blicket daxed the wug to the blorg, adults can infer that the event involved transfer and that dax means something kind of like give (Gilette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Kako, 2006;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004 There is rich body of evidence showing that basic spatial and temporal cues play a critical role in distinguishing a causal event from a noncausal one (Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Leslie, 1984;Michotte, 1963;Muentener & Carey, 2010). This kind of causal perception has primarily been studied using simple motion events with two sub-events (e.g., one billiard ball rolling, and then another one rolling).…”

“…There is rich body of evidence showing that basic spatial and temporal cues play a critical role in distinguishing a causal event from a noncausal one (Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Leslie, 1984;Michotte, 1963;Muentener & Carey, 2010). This kind of causal perception has primarily been studied using simple motion events with two sub-events (e.g., one billiard ball rolling, and then another one rolling).…”

“…For example, when 6 month olds see an intact causal event, they dishabituate strongly to a new event where the first ball (the causal agent) changes (Leslie & Keeble, 1987). In contrast, if they see an event with a spatiotemporal gap like (b), they are less impressed by changes in the first ball.…”

Dissociating Processes Supporting Causal Perception and Causal Inference in the Brain.

“…Some authors have suggested that the perception of causality may even be served by a specialized cognitive module (Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Scholl & Nakayama, 2002).…”