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

项目总结/摘要 人类非常善于从世界中提取因果关系的表征。除了 通过抽象推理来识别因果关系，有一些物理相互作用，人类可以理解。 视为因果关系。然而，尽管因果表征在我们日常生活中处于中心地位（考虑到 在过去的五年里，你和周围的环境有多少因果关系 然而，因果知觉的起源并没有得到很好的理解。也没有一个明确的帐户如何 因果知觉出现在婴儿期，也不知道它如何与发展中的因果概念相互作用。迄今为止的领域 一直专注于解决这些问题，只使用一种类型的因果事件，称为“发射”，其中， 一个物体与另一个物体碰撞并“发射”它，使它移动。最近对成年人的研究 确定了这些发射事件和另一种类型的发射事件之间因果感知的绝对区别， 被称为“触发”的事件，其中一个对象接触另一个对象并“触发”自主运动，即 运动超过了碰撞力所施加的牛顿约束。探讨这些 婴儿期的事件类别将告知我们对因果感知如何发展以及如何发展的理解。 与生命第一年的概念发展相互作用。拟议的研究启动了这项研究计划 通过解决两个问题：1）感知事件中因果关系的能力是否随着事件的发生而出现 在多个事件中对因果角色（代理人和患者）进行持久归因的能力，或者因果 事件知觉先于这些倾向性归因？2)婴儿会做出不同的持久推断吗 关于物体是否在意向上是自我推进的和能动的，这取决于它们是被发射的，还是 被触发了这些发现不仅将为核心人类的发展提供新颖独特的见解， 能力及其与头脑中其他发展概念的联系，将为未来的努力提供基础 量化因果表征的提取和操纵如何影响发展中国家的发展， 紊乱

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.