The cradle of causal reasoning: newborns’ preference for physical causality

Abstract

Perception of mechanical (i.e. physical) causality, in terms of a cause-effect relationship between two motion events, appears to be a powerful mechanism in our daily experience. In spite of a growing interest in the earliest causal representations, the role of experience in the origin of this sensitivity is still a matter of dispute. Here, we asked the question about the innate origin of causal perception, never tested before at birth. Three experiments were carried out to investigate sensitivity at birth to some visual spatiotemporal cues present in a launching event. Newborn babies, only a few hours old, showed that they significantly preferred a physical causality event (i.e. Michotte's Launching effect) when matched to a delay event (i.e. a delayed launching; Experiment 1) or to a non-causal event completely identical to the causal one except for the order of the displacements of the two objects involved which was swapped temporally (Experiment 3). This preference for the launching event, moreover, also depended on the continuity of the trajectory between the objects involved in the event (Experiment 2). These results support the hypothesis that the human system possesses an early available, possibly innate basic mechanism to compute causality, such a mechanism being sensitive to the additive effect of certain well-defined spatiotemporal cues present in the causal event independently of any prior visual experience.

Effects of causal information on the early word learning: Efficiency and longevity

“…As a result, causal information and associated words were more readily and fully encoded (Craik, Govoni, Naveh-Benjamin, & Anderson, 1996;Uncapher & Rugg, 2005). This possibility is consistent with evidence that infants attend more to causal than non-causal events (Mascalzoni, Regolin, Vallortigara, & Simion, 2013). Young children are also particularly interested in learning about causal properties of objects.…”

Escritura colaborativa de textos en quinto grado: Razonamiento y argumentación causal sobre un fenómeno físico

“…El razonamiento sobre la causalidad física, es decir, la apreciación de la interacción entre dos eventos en términos de las relaciones causa-efecto ha tenido un rol central en la comprensión del mundo físico (Mascalzoni, Regolin, Vallortigara y Simion, 2013). El razonamiento causal, según Atance, Metcalf, Martin-Ordas y Walker (2014), está ya presente en el razonamiento de menores de tres años sobre el mundo físico bajo el "principio de prioridad", el cual establece que las causas de las acciones o fenómenos preceden a sus consecuencias.…”

Mechanisms responsible for the development of causal perception in infancy.

“…In sum, the set of studies reported by Mascalzoni et al (2013) falls short of demonstrating the existence of an innate ability to represent causal relations. The use of preference as a measure is problematic in that it remains unclear how a simple visual preference provides a measure of causal perception.…”

“…Another way to determine whether causal perception is innate in origin, however, is to look for evidence that newborns can reliably discriminate between causal and non-causal events. In the only study to examine causal perception at birth, Mascalzoni, Regolin, Vallortigara, and Simion (2013) Experiment 2 presented infants with a direct and delayed launching event side-by-side.…”

“…Thus, it would seem that if newborns possess an innate disposition to attend to events involving physical causality the correct prediction for Experiment 2 should be that infants would show no preference for either of the events, as both should be interpreted as non-causal. In the third experiment reported by Mascalzoni et al (2013), newborns viewed a direct launching event and an "inverted-sequence" of the same event (see Figure 5). In the inverted sequence object B first moved from the center of the screen toward one side, followed immediately by the movement of object A from the opposite side toward the center.…”