title: Knowing who dunnit: Infants identify the causal agent in an unseen causal interaction.
abstract: Preverbal infants can represent the causal structure of events, including distinguishing the agentive and receptive roles and categorizing entities according to stable causal dispositions. This study investigated how infants combine these 2 kinds of causal inference. In Experiments 1 and 2, 9.5-month-olds used the position of a human hand or a novel puppet (causal agents), but not a toy train (an inert object), to predict the subsequent motion of a beanbag. Conversely, in Experiment 3, 10- and 7-month-olds used the motion of the beanbag to infer the position of a hand but not of a toy block. These data suggest that preverbal infants expect a causal agent as the source of motion of an inert object.
authors.affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. saxe@mit.edu
authors.forename: Rebecca
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Saxe
authors.forename: Tania
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tzelnic
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Carey
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D001364:Awareness; D015984:Causality; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D007223:Infant; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D009949:Orientation; D011340:Problem Solving; D002666:Psychology, Child; D012718:Set, Psychology; D012931:Social Environment