Infants' understanding of the causal power of agents and tools

Tools are objects that are manipulated by agents with the intention to cause an effect in the world. We show that the cognitive capacity to understand tools is present in young infants, even if these tools produce arbitrary, causally opaque effects. In experiments 1-2, we used pupillometry to show t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2023-12, Vol.120 (50), p.e2309669120
Main Authors: Adibpour, Parvaneh, Hochmann, Jean-Rémy
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognitive ability
Cognitive science
Eye
Humans
Infant
Infants
Intention
Intuition
Life Sciences
Neurons and Cognition
Predation
Psychology and behavior
Pupillometry
Social Sciences
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Summary:Tools are objects that are manipulated by agents with the intention to cause an effect in the world. We show that the cognitive capacity to understand tools is present in young infants, even if these tools produce arbitrary, causally opaque effects. In experiments 1-2, we used pupillometry to show that 8-mo-old infants infer an invisible causal contact to account for the-otherwise unexplained-motion of a ball. In experiments 3, we probed 8-mo-old infants' account of a state change event (flickering of a cube) that lies outside of the explanatory power of intuitive physics. Infants repeatedly watched an intentional agent launch a ball behind an occluder. After a short delay, a cube, positioned at the other end of the occluder began flickering. Rare unoccluded events served to probe infants' representation of what happened behind the occluder. Infants exhibited larger pupil dilation, signaling more surprise, when the ball stopped before touching the cube, than when it contacted the cube, suggesting that infants inferred that the cause of the state change was contact between the ball and the cube. This effect was canceled in experiment 4, when an inanimate sphere replaced the intentional agent. Altogether, results suggest that, in the infants' eyes, a ball (an inanimate object) has the power to cause an arbitrary state change, but only if it inherits this power from an intentional agent. Eight-month-olds are thus capable of representing complex event structures, involving an intentional agent causing a change with a tool.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.2309669120