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Perception Versus Knowledge of Cause and Effect in Children: When Seeing Is Believing

Recent research has shown that even infants have perceptual sensitivity to the causal structure of the world, and it is often claimed that causal knowledge supports many of preschoolers' impressive cognitive achievements. That older children nevertheless can encounter difficulties in causal-reasoning tasks is typically attributed to lack of domain knowledge. A different explanation, however, is that causal structure may appear at more than one level, in perception, as well as in underlying knowledge. Children may make some reasoning errors because they have difficulty coordinating these levels. This article reviews relevant evidence on physical causality: Even infants in their first year perceive the causal structure of simple collision events. This perceptual skill could support rapid causal learning without prior knowledge and thus helps us understand children's precocity preschoolers already reason with the assumption that causes and effects are linked by underlying physical mechanisms. However, what may promote early development may later become a hindrance: When perception and mechanism point to different causes, children may not realize that mechanism is superordinate. Although the components of competent causal reasoning are available early in development, much experience may be required before children learn how to integrate them.