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

项目摘要/摘要 人类非常擅长从世界中提取因果关系的表示。除了……之外 通过抽象推理来识别因果联系，存在一些人类无法抗拒的物理相互作用 认为是因果的。然而，尽管因果陈述在我们的日常生活中处于中心地位(请考虑 在过去的五年中，你与周围环境发生了多少次因果互动？ 几分钟)，因果知觉的起源还没有被很好地理解。既没有清楚的说明是如何 因果知觉出现在婴儿期，也不知道它是如何与发展中的因果概念相互作用的。到目前为止的字段 只使用一种称为“发射”的因果事件来解决这些问题，在这种情况下 一个物体与另一个物体相撞，并将其“发射”，使其移动。最近对成年人的研究表明 确定了这些发射事件和另一种类型的发射事件在因果感知上的分类区别 被称为“触发”的事件，其中一个物体接触另一个物体并“触发”自主运动，即 超过碰撞力施加的牛顿约束的运动。对这些问题的探索 婴儿期的事件分类将使我们了解因果知觉是如何发展以及如何发展的。 在生命的第一年与概念发展相互作用。拟议的研究启动了这一研究计划 通过回答两个问题：1)在事件中感知因果关系的能力是否伴随着 能够对多个事件中的因果角色(代理和患者)进行持久的归因，或确定因果关系 事件知觉先于这些倾向归因？2)婴儿会做出不同持久的推论吗？ 关于物体是否根据它们是发射或发射的，是处置性的自我推进和代理 触发了吗？这些发现不仅将为核心人类的发展提供新的和独特的见解 能力及其与头脑中其他发展中概念的联系，它将为未来的努力提供基础 量化因果表征的提取和操作在发育过程中的作用 精神错乱。

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.