DEVELOPMENT OF INFANTS USE OF CONTINUITY CUES IN THEIR PERCEPTION OF CAUSALITY

Two experiments investigated the role of continuity cues in infants' perception of launching events as causal. Experiment 1 showed that 7-month-old infants can use spatial and temporal continguity to perceive causality: Infants who were habituated to a causal event dishabituated to novel noncausal events, in which either spatial or temporal contiguity was violated, and those who were habituated to a noncausal event dishabituated to a novel causal but not a novel noncausal event. Experiment 2 showed that 10-month-olds, but not 7-month-olds, perceived the causality of launching events in which the objects moved along dissimilar paths. Thus, younger infants do not appear to attend to causality when the objects move along different paths. Results are discussed in terms of the development of the use of continuity cues in causal judgments.