The Emergence and Development of Causal Representations

Abstract

In this article I intend to analyze how infants’ initial causal representations emerge and how their primitive causal knowledge evolves during cognitive development. Recent studies from developmental psychology report that infants acquire knowledge of physical causality earlier than what Piaget has described—by 6 months of age infants have already shown signs of sensibility to causality in simply physical events such as mechanical collision. Studies also suggest that infants recognize causality at such an early age by activating a primitive schema that uses merely spatial and temporal cues to identify causal relations. As infants grow, they learn to use complex information to identify causal relations, and they eventually acquire sophisticated schemas to represent causality. However, the development of causal knowledge is not a linear progression as Piaget has suggested. Infants’ primitive causal schema never disappears completely when infant grow and acquire mature understanding of causal relations. Infants’ primitive causal schema continues to exist in adulthood and plays a role in adults’ cognitive processing. When adults’ cognitive system is overloaded by processing information required by sophisticated causal schemas, it would protect itself by falling back to a lower level of information processing and returning to the primitive causal schema. When adults fall back to the primitive causal schema and overextend it beyond the realm of mechanical causation, misconceptions are bound to occur.