title: Does causal action facilitate causal perception in infants younger than 6 months of age?
abstract: Previous research has established that infants are unable to perceive causality until 6¼ months of age. The current experiments examined whether infants' ability to engage in causal action could facilitate causal perception prior to this age. In Experiment 1, 4½-month-olds were randomly assigned to engage in causal action experience via Velcro sticky mittens or not engage in causal action because they wore non-sticky mittens. Both groups were then tested in the visual habituation paradigm to assess their causal perception. Infants who engaged in causal action - but not those without this causal action experience - perceived the habituation events as causal. Experiment 2 used a similar design to establish that 4½-month-olds are unable to generalize their own causal action to causality observed in dissimilar objects. These data are the first to demonstrate that infants under 6 months of age can perceive causality, and have implications for the mechanisms underlying the development of causal perception.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15232, USA. rakison@andrew.cmu.edu
authors.forename: David H
authors.initials: DH
authors.lastname: Rakison
authors.forename: Lauren
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Krogh
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D007858:Learning; D009039:Motion Perception; D015588:Observer Variation; D010465:Perception; D014796:Visual Perception