Infant’s Causal Understanding Development
Psychology
Infant’s Causal Understanding Development
Introduction
Parents tend to think that behind every baby’s gurgling is a mind that knows no awareness of its environment and that the collective movements and responses are part of meaningless gestures. However, scientists are beginning to unfold the long-standing question of whether babies can understand words and actions before they can learn to speak. This question of infant’s causal understanding and its development will be the focus of this study. The study aims to explore the origins and how an infant’s perception of causality develops. The importance of understanding causality among infants is to shed light on the assumption that cause and effect is a product of prolonged learning. In the case of infant’s, it is apparent that most people would assume that babies cannot perceive cause and effect because they are not exposed yet to any form of cognitive learning. Furthermore, the idea of cause and effect is believed to have originated from scientific thoughts and common sense (Leslie and Keeble, 1987).
If that is the case, it is safe to assume that infants do not have such understanding of causality because they lack the pre-requisites for it. The described assumption will be explored in this study through observations and experimental model adapted from Oakes (1994). Earlier researches on cognitive development have focused largely on the behavioral aspects of childhood development, but few literatures were found to have sufficient evidence that explains the process on how an infant perceives causality. In the past literary sources, Leslie (1987) argued that solely the temporal and spatial arrangement of events not merely their understanding causal connections would be sensed. Since causal understandings are not identified by logic force, our causal world belief could only be due to our part “imagination”.
Furthermore, the author asserts that the young ones could be sensitive to their effort’s feeling that accompanies their actions. Drawing from this concept, the study presents its working hypothesis that infants are able to understand or perceive causality in a sophisticated way, which uses continuity, cues in judging causality. However, perceptions of causality are different in terms of development in relation to age. As such, the study aims to test whether there is an association between the infants’ age and their general development of causal understanding. The independent variable for the study would be the infants’ age. The dependent variables on the other hand would be the launched events using simple objects that were moved to similar and dissimilar paths. The aforementioned variables were used to determine whether infants use temporal or spatial contiguity and how the variation in age determines understanding of the perceived causality. The two variables can be measured by observing how the infants in different age react to the moving object and determine how fast they react to the stimuli and habituation.
Literature Review
One of the most well established concepts about infant’s causal understanding and development is that the kind of stimulus that causes the illusion of causality among adults is the same among infants (Leslie and Keeble, 1987). This conclusion from the study conducted by Leslie and Keeble (1987) gave rise to the understanding of whether six-month-old infants perceive causality. The experimental model employed in the study involves using illustrations of sequences that are moving in different duration, thus demonstrating the concept of habituation and direct launching. The experiment was divided into two parts where the first one had illustrations of color-coded bricks moving in a one-second interval in direct launching. The result of the first experiment suggests that infants perceived the event because of its two aspects namely the temporal succession of movement and the spatial contacts (Leslie and Keeble, 1987, p. 269). There were several comparisons made by the authors to establish relationships between the spatial and temporal aspects. However the experiment reveals that infants encode direct launching as a singular movement determined through a change in color as the object moves across the screen.
The results of the study conducted by Leslie and Keeble (1987) was able to provide significant insights and fundamental concepts that will help frame this study. On the other hand, the theoretical concepts attributed to the literature were based on the hypothesis of Hume and Michotte (1984), which gives an impression that Leslie and Keeble’s study did not introduce a unique idea that can help further discovery of mystery behind infant’s causal development. Despite the inability of the literature to provide a new concept that strongly reveals the understanding of causality among infants, the presented methodology in the research provides a relevant model that can be adopted in this study. Moreover, the most important contribution of the literature for this study is the idea that causal development varies according to the infant’s age. Hence, the spatiotemporal properties of an event do not indicate the perception of causality among infants.
Further into the exploration of the developments of causal understanding among infants, Vaish and Woodward (2009) conducted a study to determine the origins of causal understanding by determining whether attention or emotion predicts the action. The focuses of the study are 14 months old infants, which were tested together with their parents in a two-part experiment. The first one is the familiarization test and the second part is referred to as coding and reliability. The results of the study suggest that a 14-month old infant is not able to distinguish or predict actions based on both emotional and attention cues. Instead, infants at the given stage are only able to predict actions through attention (Vaish and Woodward, 2009). Being able to determine what triggers prediction of actions among infants is imperative in establishing the concept of action-based causal understanding, which is considered as a significant aspect of cognitive development among children (Vaish and Woodward, 2009, p. 86). The important contribution of the literature to this study is the explicit knowledge about the infants’ tendency to predict actions and establishing attention as the main triggering mechanism. The context of the literature highlights the important cues that determine the infants’ causal understanding.
Talking about cues brings up the concept presented Oakes (1994) in her research on infant’s use of continuity cues in establishing perception of causality. The study conducted by Oakes (1994) was divided into experiments, which aims to determine the roles that continuity cues play in an infant’s perception of events in relation to cause and effect (p. 869). It is apparent from the study that the infant’s age is an important factor that determines perception of causality as revealed in the results of the study:
“Experiment 1 showed that 7-month-old infants can use spatial and temporal contiguity to perceive causality: Infants who were habituated to a causal event dishabituated to novel non-causal events, in which either spatial or temporal contiguity was violated, and those who were habituated to a non-causal event dishabituated to a novel causal but not a novel noncausal event” (Oakes, 1994, p. 869).
The article presents several theories pertaining to continuity cues and causal perception. It was found from the study that the temporal and spatial contiguity are the cues to causality (Michotte, 1963). Early assumptions were made on the fact that although spatial and temporal cues lead to causality, observers of launching events may perceive it with conflict. For example, an infant observing two moving objects may only perceive a single distinct object as causal, which can be characterized as a conflict (Mochotte, 1963). On the other hand, White (1988) also argued that the perceived similarity in cause and effect, spatial contiguity, temporal orders, and temporal contiguity comprises the continuity cues because they all encompass a continuous movement. On the context of launching movement, it creates conflict because regardless if there are two moving objects together. This is because even if the moving objects are more than one, the fact that they are moving in a single direction emanates the movement consistent with that of a single object.
The importance of the theoretical underpinnings presented in the study by Oakes (1994) is the perception of causality among infants where continuity cues provides the alternative explanation of its understanding of development. Another example given in the article that provides an important point of understanding regarding causality among infants is that 6 ½-months old babies tend to respond to contrasts between events with a change in causality than contrasts that emerges between a couple of non-causal events (Oakes, 1994, p. 870). This idea encompasses the concepts of delayed launching events and non-collision events. This assumption was expressed on the results of the two experiments where the condition of habitual events where causal with direct launching and non-causal with collision and delayed was measured was measured. The designed experiment also allowed several hypotheses to be tested more specifically when determining the infants’ responses to a familiar test.
The test of familiarity and recovery of attention suggests that for seven months old babies, they do not usually respond to causality of nonstandard launching events provided the infants see the movements together. Hence, infants use cues to the changes in causality, but the variation in perception depends upon the age of the infant. In relation to this study, the concepts presented in the article provide the theoretical underpinnings for that will also help frame the context of this exploration. Furthermore, gaining insights to the cues to causality contributes largely to the understanding of causal development among infants, which this study also aims to determine. For some of the average readers, the term causality is a jargon that does not come along on a regular casual discussion, but causality encompasses a broad concept of cognitive development among infants and adults as well. For most of the adults, it is apparent that the launching event can be recognized as an illusion of causality (Michotte, 1963). However, in the case of infants, it is more difficult to determine causality because of an infant’s incapability to effectively communicate its thoughts (Lewis et al., 1995).
However, further understanding of causality begins with tracing of the concept as far back as 1777, but the a more in-depth exploration of this theory was introduced by Hume (1993) who at the time was able to explore the concept of causation from an example of a billiard ball striking another as a demonstration of events and inference of causation. In this regard, talking about perception of causality among infants would bring the discussion towards the infant’s tendency at one point during their development. Hence, the infants’ perception of causality can be viewed as treating the gaps between events and delay is as the same. Meanwhile, other investigator of the subject such as Piaget (1954) discussed the various stages of understanding about physical causality.
According to Piaget (1954), the notion of causality was drawn from one’s own power over limbs and other physical elements. This theoretical underpinning was divided into two categories referred to as phenomenological causality and causal efficacy. In relation to an infant’s perception of causality, Piaget (1954) suggests that at the early stage of an infant’s life, he has no deeper understanding of his environment, the object, or self, which means that infants has no understanding of physical or psychological causality (Cohen et al., 1998). These concepts represent the theoretical underpinnings of this discussion, which will also contribute to successfully achieving the core objectives of the study.
The study will use the systematic random sampling technique in selecting the infants subjects aged between 25 and 30 weeks since the literature reveals that it is children in this age bracket who are usually at the height of development of their understanding of causality. The procedure will involve using open-ended questionnaire, which would be used for the detailed assessment of these infants’ parents. The invitation to participate will be sent through email and social media where a letter of consent will be also included to secure permission from the parents to subject their infants to the experiment. In addition, a full description of the experiment will be provided together with the invitation to allow the parents to have an insight on what will transpire during the experiment.
The target number of subjects for this study is 10 pairs of parents and infants (the infants will consist of 5 females and five males), but as a target margin, the study will accept a minimum of 8 pairs and a maximum of 12. The names and contact number of the infants and their parents will be obtained from the county birth records with permission from the university. As soon as the parents signed the consent form or replied to email, the subjects will be sent a schedule for the target date of the experiment. Apart from the questionnaire, the study will also employ the use of experimental model adopted from Oakes (1994). The model is composed of a stimuli and an observational record. In terms of stimuli, the infants will be placed in a playroom with the parent. In the playroom, the researcher will roll color-coded basketballs from one end of the room to another, which will demonstrate the launching event. For the delayed event, a red basketball will be moved to touch the blue basketball. This design was to test the infant’s perception of the movement of the ball to determine whether they are habituated to non-causal or causal launching events.
Expected Results
The study will focus on finding out from the infant’s mothers whether their ages had in any case influenced their causal development. This will help in shedding more light on their cognitive development. More specifically, this study expects to yield the following findings: infants understand or perceive causality using continuity; infants’ attention actually decreases during habituation; infants are likely to increase attention towards novel stimuli; the characteristics of the specific objects in a scenario are extraneous for infant’s sensitivity to causality; infants habitually perceive spatially and temporally connected episodes as causal; infants recognize the launching effect when observing a simulation of objects in collision; infants have an innate perceptual ability which fully enable the development of the perceptual discernments that establish the signal for the launching effect; processing of causality in infancy is not fixed and adjusts over time; and, in infancy, the existence or nonexistence of causality is more important than the event itself.
The above assumptions are made based on the observation expectation of the length of time that the infants are looking into the stimuli. Generally, the decrease in attention will be determined by comparing the duration of the infants looking at the stimuli. Basically, what this study expects to demonstrate is that infants can and do understand causality. Psychologists have already shown that infants gain knowledge of the causal mechanism around them and do so with much promptness and precision. These learning processes could greatly contribute to the development of sophisticated causal perception. Future studies must aim at revealing the nature of these dynamics.
Conclusions
Even though the study may have technicalities like errors in recording figure and biases, it would be able to help both the psychologists and the scientists understand cognitive development among infants. Furthermore, the study reveals the important aspects that influence an infant’s perception of causality where launching event is not usually the factor that triggers attention of the infant, but rather the novel stimuli. A pattern was also determined from the preliminary review of literature that the infant’s perception and understanding of causality varies across the infant’s age and stages of development. The findings in this study cannot yet conclude the final outcome of the research because it is still at the proposal stage.
One of the limitations of the study is the lack of mathematical model that will present the findings in a quantitative form. Second, the conclusions from this research will be restricted as there could be uncertainties concerning the level of generalizability. The number of research subjects restricted the opportunity to use advanced statistical measurements and hence explore the multifaceted correlations between the variables. Future studies should take into consideration a bigger sample of infants. Third, an experimental methodology analyzing the postulated correlations could result in more valid causal findings. There should be more exercises, besides the ‘basketball’ experiment, designed to establish the infants’ level of habituation to non-causal or causal launching events. A more systematic observational model should also be formulated and carried out.
And, lastly, this study does not take into consideration the factors related to parenting. A more thorough analysis of the literature could provide insights as regards the influence of parenting in the development of infants’ ability to perceive and understand causality. Future research should consider all these relevant variables. On the other hand, the expectations on the findings can be considered as a reasonable theoretical foundation for future research pertaining to infant’s development, particularly in accurately determining the stages of development of infants in relation to age.
References
Cohen, L. B. (1998). The development of infant causal perception (Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas). Retrieved from http://pages.uoregon.edu/redford/Papers4download/LBC-GA-MAR-MC_InfantCog_98.pdf
Hume, D. (1993). An enquiry concerning human understanding. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Leslie, A., & Keeble, S. (1987). Do six-month-old infants perceive causality? Cognition,25, 265-288. doi:10.1016/S0010-0277(87)80006-9
Lipsitt, L. P., & Rovee-Collier, C. (1995). Advances in infancy research: Vol. 9. Norwood, OH: Ablex Pub. Corp.
Michotte, A. (1963). The perception of causality. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Oakes, L. M. (1994). Development of infant's use of continuity cues in their perception of causality. Developmental Psychology, 30(6), 869-879. Retrieved from http://www.psychologie.uzh.ch/fachrichtungen/ehem-einheiten/genpsy/deaktiviert/studium/lehrmaterialien/kausal/oakes.pdf
Piaget, J. (1954). The construction of reality in the child. New York: Basic Books.
Vaish, A., & Woodward, A. (2010). Infants use attention but not emotions to predict others’ actions. Infant Behavior & Development, 33, 79–87. doi:10.1016/j.infbeh.2009.11.003
White, P. A. (1988). Causal processing: Origins and development. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 36-52.
