Causal Perception of Animate Surface Features in 9-, 13-, and 17-Month-Old Infants

<p dir="ltr">Causal perception is the ability to identify the agent and recipient in a physical event (e.g., when one pool ball hits another) and to understand that the agent changes the state of the recipient (e.g., the first pool ball causes the second one to move). An ongoing study that tests whether infants attend to the shape, color, or rotation of an agent suggests that 9-month-old babies encode the color of an agent in a causal event whereas 13-month-olds encode the shape and orientation of the agent but not its color. To expand on the ongoing study, the current experiment tested the same age groups to determine what animate surface features of the agents infants encode. In this study, infants are shown a series of causal events in which the agent possesses eyes, a mouth, and a pair of hands. In each of a series of test trials, each of these animate surface features are replaced with a different feature. Preliminary results suggest that 13-month-olds may encode hands and mouths, while 9-month-olds may attend primarily to hands. These findings support a developmental progression in which infants increasingly encode socially meaningful features of agents over time.</p>