Causal Event Categories in Infancy: The Origins and Consequences of Causal Perception

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Humans are extremely adept at extracting representations of causal relationships from the world. In addition to identifying causal links by abstract reasoning, there are some physical interactions that humans irresistibly perceive as causal. However, despite the centrality of causal representations in our everyday lives (consider for a moment how many cause-and-effect interactions you have had with your surroundings in the last five minutes), the origins of causal perception are not well understood. There is neither a clear account of how causal perception emerges in infancy, nor how it interacts with developing causal concepts. The field to date has focused on addressing these questions using only one type of causal event, called “launching”, in which one object collides with another object and “launches” it, causing it to move. Recent work with adults has identified a categorical distinction in causal perception between these launching events and another type of event called “triggering”, in which one object contacts another object and “triggers” autonomous motion, i.e. movement that exceeds the Newtonian constraints imposed by the force of the collision. Exploration of these event categories in infancy will inform our understanding of how causal perception develops and how it interacts with conceptual development in the first year of life. The proposed studies start this research program by addressing two questions: 1) Does the ability to perceive causal relationships in an event emerge with the ability to make enduring attributions of causal roles (agent and patient) across multiple events, or does causal event perception precede these dispositional attributions? 2) Do infants make different enduring inferences about whether objects are dispositionally self-propelled and agentive based on whether they are launched or triggered? These findings will not only provide novel and unique insight into the development of a core human ability and its connection to other developing concepts in the mind, it will provide a foundation for future efforts to quantify how the extraction and manipulation of causal representations are affected in developmental disorders.