Infants'
Recognition of Causality: Discrimination between Inanimate Objects
and People
D. Kosugi & K. Fujita |
We
describe two series of experiments which examined whether and how
young infants recognize causality in object motion and in human actions.
The first series demonstrated using launching events featuring objects
and people, that 8- but not -month-old infants appreciate that physical
contact is necessary to set inanimate objects into motion but not
to set people into motion. Eight-month-old infants appear to appreciate
that people interact at a distance through some means of communication.
The second series demonstrated that, when they see a stationary ball
half-hidden by an occluder starting to move, 10-month-old infants
infer the presence of the hidden agent that caused the ball to move.
However, they do not infer the presence of the agent when a person
replaced the ball. These findings suggest that infants differentiate
between causes of object motion and those of human actions. Key words; causal reasoning, cognitive development, habituation method, infants, naive physics |