Recognition of causality in human infants

Daisuke Kosugi

Kyoto University, Japan

The perception and understanding of cause-effect relations is important even in infancy. For example, causal understanding may help infants recognize the actions occurring in the environment as a set of correlated events, rather than as independent actions. Recent researches have provided evidence that infants have remarkable understanding of causality. Kosugi and Fujita (submitted), for example, examined 4- and 8-month-old infants' interpretation of the events in which a moving object (or person) caused another stationary object (or person), using the visual habituation method. The question investigated in this research was whether infants infer that a collision was necessary for the motion of the stationary object (or person), that is, whether they were surprised to see that the stationary object start to move without being hit by the moving object (or person). Results showed that both 4- and 8-month-old infants recognized different causality in such events between objects and persons; while the infants looked at the "collision" event when the event featured objects, they looked both events equally when the event featured people. Furthermore, in an unpublished experiment, we examined infants' inference of agent-recipient relations. Ten-month-old infants were first habituated to the event in which a stationary ball half-hidden by an occluder started to move. Then they were tested with fully visible events in which (a) the ball was pushed by a hand or (b) it began to move by itself without agent. The results indicated that the infants presumed the agent behind the occluder -- they looked at the latter, no-agent event for longer duration than the former notwithstanding the novelty of the hand. However, when a person replaced the ball, they looked at those events equally. These results also indicate that young infants appreciate the different causal rules between colliding events involving people and those involving inanimate objects.

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Kosugi, Daisuke

Department of Psychology, Kyoto University

Yoshida Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan

kosugi@psy.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp