Causal understanding as a developmental primitive

The major thesis of this paper is that causal understanding is a developmental primitive: Children develop core concepts of causality at a very early age, causality plays a necessary role in subsequent developments across many different domains, and basic causal processes can be activated automatically or implicitly, with minimal effort. This automaticity is not developed through extensive practice or overlearning, but occurs from the outset. To support the view of causal concepts during the first 2 years of life in perception, in the understanding of sequences of events. We then review literature suggesting that causal understanding is necessary for the development of naive theories of physics and psychology, for some applications of domain general mechanisms such as categorization and analogical reasoning, and for certain aspects of language development and text comprehension. We also argue that causal understanding in these domains often begins as an automatic rather than a controlled process. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.