Causality and continuity close the gaps in event representations.

Imagine you see a video of someone pulling back their leg to kick a soccer ball, and then a soccer ball soaring toward a goal. You would likely infer that these scenes are two parts of the same event, and this inference would likely cause you to remember having seen the moment the person kicked the soccer ball, even if that information was never actually presented (Strickland & Keil, 2011, Cognition, 121[3], 409-415). What cues trigger people to "fill in" causal events from incomplete information? Is it due to the experience they have had with soccer balls being kicked toward goals? Is it the visual similarity of the object in both halves of the video? Or is it the mere spatiotemporal continuity of the event? In three experiments, we tested these different potential mechanisms underlying the "filling-in" effect. Experiment 1 showed that filling in occurs equally in familiar and unfamiliar contexts, indicating that familiarity with specific event schemas is unnecessary to trigger false memory. Experiment 2 showed that the visible continuation of a launched object's trajectory is all that is required to trigger filling in, regardless of other occurrences in the second half of the scene. Finally, Experiment 3 found that, using naturalistic videos, this filling-in effect is more heavily affected if the object's trajectory is discontinuous in space/time compared with if the object undergoes a noticeable transformation. Together, these findings indicate that the spontaneous formation of causal event representations is driven by object representation systems that prioritize spatiotemporal information over other object features.

Building a collaborative Psychological Science: Lessons learned from ManyBabies 1.

The field of infancy research faces a difficult challenge: some questions require samples that are simply too large for any one lab to recruit and test. ManyBabies aims to address this problem by forming large-scale collaborations on key theoretical questions in developmental science, while promoting the uptake of Open Science practices. Here, we look back on the first project completed under the ManyBabies umbrella - ManyBabies 1 - which tested the development of infant-directed speech preference. Our goal is to share the lessons learned over the course of the project and to articulate our vision for the role of large-scale collaborations in the field. First, we consider the decisions made in scaling up experimental research for a collaboration involving 100+ researchers and 70+ labs. Next, we discuss successes and challenges over the course of the project, including: protocol design and implementation, data analysis, organizational structures and collaborative workflows, securing funding, and encouraging broad participation in the project. Finally, we discuss the benefits we see both in ongoing ManyBabies projects and in future large-scale collaborations in general, with a particular eye towards developing best practices and increasing growth and diversity in infancy research and psychological science in general. Throughout the paper, we include first-hand narrative experiences, in order to illustrate the perspectives of researchers playing different roles within the project. While this project focused on the unique challenges of infant research, many of the insights we gained can be applied to large-scale collaborations across the broader field of psychology.

Categories and Constraints in Causal Perception.

When object A moves adjacent to a stationary object, B, and in that instant A stops moving and B starts moving, people irresistibly see this as an event in which A causes B to move. Real-world causal collisions are subject to Newtonian constraints on the relative speed of B following the collision, but here we show that perceptual constraints on the relative speed of B (which align imprecisely with Newtonian principles) define two categories of causal events in perception. Using performance-based tasks, we show that triggering events, in which B moves noticeably faster than A, are treated as being categorically different from launching events, in which B does not move noticeably faster than A, and that these categories are unique to causal events (Experiments 1 and 2). Furthermore, we show that 7- to 9-month-old infants are sensitive to this distinction, which suggests that this boundary may be an early-developing component of causal perception (Experiment 3).

Infants' representations of michottean triggering events.

The classic Michottean 'launching' event is consistent with a real-world Newtonian elastic collision. Previous research has shown that adult humans distinguish launching events that obey some of the physical constraints on Newtonian elastic collisions from events that do not do so early in visual processing, and that infants do so early in development (< 9 months of age). These include that in a launching event, the speed of the agent can be 3 times faster (or more) than that of the patient but the speed of the patient cannot be detectably greater than the speed of the agent. Experiment 1 shows that 7-8-month-old infants also distinguish canonical launching events from events in which the motion of the patient is rotated 90° from the trajectory of the motion of the agent (another outcome ruled out by the physics of elastic collisions). Violations of both the relative speed and the angle constraints create Michottean 'triggering' events, in which adults describe the motion of the patient as autonomous but not spontaneous, i.e., still initiated by contact with the causal agent. Experiments 2 and 3 begin to explore whether infants of this age construe Michottean triggering events as causal. We find that infants of this age are not sensitive to a reversal of the agent and patient in triggering events, thus failing to exhibit one of the signatures of representing an event as causal. We argue that there are likely several independent events schemas with causal content represented by young infants, and the literature on the origins of causal cognition in infancy would benefit from systematic investigations of event schemas other than launching events.

Talk of the Town mobile app platform: New method for engaging family in STEM learning and research in homes and communities.

Children do not just learn in the classroom. They engage in "informal learning" every day just by spending time with their family and peers. However, while researchers know this occurs, less is known about the science of this learning-how this learning works. This is so because investigators lack access to those moments of informal learning. In this mini-review we present a technical solution: a mobile-based research platform called "Talk of the Town" that will provide a window into children's informal learning. The tool will be open to all researchers and educators and is flexibly adaptable to these needs. It allows access to data that have never been studied before, providing a means for developing and testing vast educational interventions, and providing access to much more diverse samples than are typically studied in laboratories, homes, and science museums. The review details the promise and challenges associated with these new methods of data collection and family engagement in STEM learning sciences.

Infants' Attributions of Insides and Animacy in Causal Interactions.

Past work has found that infants show more interest when an object that has at least two properties of animate beings, such as engaging in self-generated motion and having fur, is shown to be hollow than when an object with none or one of these properties is revealed to be hollow. When an object is grabbed by a hand and moved to a new place, by 7 months of age, infants explain the motion of the object as due to the hand, and thus do not interpret this object as capable of self-generated motion. This constant application of force is called an "entraining" event. Other work has found that 6-month-old infants are sensitive to the reversals of causal roles in "launching" events (billiard-ball-like collisions), but not entraining events. Here, we examine whether 10-month-old infants explain the motion of the patient in a launching event as being due to the contact with the launching agent. Experiment 1 replicates past work, showing that infants look longer when a self-propelled object with animate features (fur or feathers) is shown to be hollow, compared to a similar object undergoing spatiotemporally identical motion entrained by a human agent. Experiment 2 finds that infants look equally at the agent and patient, both covered by fur or feathers, of a launching event when each is revealed to be hollow. Experiment 3 shows that infants look longer when a fur-covered causal patient is shown to be hollow compared to a plain-box causal agent, indicating that 10-month-old infants do not explain the motion of the causal patient of a launching event as due to the agent, even though they do so for an entraining event. This dissociation suggests the existence of multiple independent causal representations in the first year of life.

An interaction effect of norm violations on causal judgment.

Existing research has shown that norm violations influence causal judg- ments, and a number of different models have been developed to explain these effects. One such model, the necessity/sufficiency model, predicts an interac- tion pattern in people's judgments. Specifically, it predicts that when people are judging the degree to which a particular factor is a cause, there should be an interaction between (a) the degree to which that factor violates a norm and (b) the degree to which another factor in the situation violates norms. A study of moral norms (N=1000) and norms of proper functioning (N=3000) revealed robust evidence for the predicted interaction effect. The implications of these patterns for existing theories of causal judgments is discussed.

"There's something inside": Children's intuitions about animate agents.

From infancy, humans have the ability to distinguish animate agents from inert objects, and preschoolers map biological and mechanical insides to their appropriate kinds. However, less is known about how identifying something as an animate agent shapes specific inferences about its internal properties. Here, we test whether preschool children (N = 92; North American population) have specifically biological expectations about animate agents, or if they have more general expectations that animate agents should have an internal source of motion. We presented preschoolers with videos of two puppets: a "self-propelled" fur-covered puppet, and a fur-covered puppet that is seen to be moved by a human actor. In addition, we presented preschoolers with images of a familiar artifact (motorcycle) and familiar animal (sheep). For each item, we asked them to choose what they thought was inside each of these entities: nothing, biological insides, or mechanical insides. Preschoolers were less likely to say that a self-propelled fur-covered object was empty, compared to a fur-covered object that was moved by a human actor, which converges with past work with infants. However, preschoolers showed no specifically biological expectations about these objects, despite being able to accurately match biological insides to familiar animals and mechanical insides to familiar artifacts on the follow-up measure. These results suggest that preschoolers do not have specifically biological expectations about animate agents as a category, but rather general expectations that such agents should not be empty inside.

The trajectory of counterfactual simulation in development.

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have trouble considering what to change and what to keep fixed when comparing counterfactual alternatives to reality. However, most developmental studies on counterfactual reasoning have relied on binary yes/no responses to counterfactual questions about complex narratives and so have only been able to document when these failures occur but not why and how. Here, we investigate counterfactual reasoning in a domain in which specific counterfactual possibilities are very concrete: simple collision interactions. In Experiment 1, we show that 5- to 10-year-old children (recruited from schools and museums in Connecticut) succeed in making predictions but struggle to answer binary counterfactual questions. In Experiment 2, we use a multiple-choice method to allow children to select a specific counterfactual possibility. We find evidence that 4- to 6-year-old children (recruited online from across the United States) do conduct counterfactual simulations, but the counterfactual possibilities younger children consider differ from adult-like reasoning in systematic ways. Experiment 3 provides further evidence that young children engage in simulation rather than using a simpler visual matching strategy. Together, these experiments show that the developmental changes in counterfactual reasoning are not simply a matter of whether children engage in counterfactual simulation but also how they do so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Organizing the Methodological Toolbox: Lessons Learned From Implementing Developmental Methods Online.

Adapting studies typically run in the lab, preschool, or museum to online data collection presents a variety of challenges. The solutions to those challenges depend heavily on the specific questions pursued, the methods used, and the constraints imposed by available technology. We present a partial sample of solutions, discussing approaches we have developed for adapting studies targeting a range of different developmental populations, from infants to school-aged children, and utilizing various online methods such as high-framerate video presentation, having participants interact with a display on their own computer, having the experimenter interact with both the participant and an actor, recording free-play with physical objects, recording infant looking times both offline and live, and more. We also raise issues and solutions regarding recruitment and representativeness in online samples. By identifying the concrete needs of a given approach, tools that meet each of those individual needs, and interfaces between those tools, we have been able to implement many (but not all) of our studies using online data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic. This systematic review aligning available tools and approaches with different methods can inform the design of future studies, in and outside of the lab.

Retinotopic adaptation reveals distinct categories of causal perception.

We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. A prototypical example of causal perception is the 'launching effect': one object (A) moves toward a stationary second object (B) until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the same direction. Beyond these motions themselves - and regardless of any higher-level beliefs - this display induces a vivid visual impression of causality, wherein A is seen to cause B's motion. Do such percepts reflect a unitary category of visual processing, or might there be multiple distinct forms of causal perception? While launching is often simply equated with causal perception, researchers have sometimes described other phenomena such as 'triggering' (in which B moves faster than A) and 'entraining' (in which A continues to move alongside B). We used psychophysical methods to determine whether these labels really carve visual processing at its joints, and how putatively different forms of causal perception relate to each other. Previous research demonstrated retinotopically specific adaptation to causality: exposure to causal launching makes subsequent ambiguous events in that same location more likely to be seen as non-causal 'passing'. Here, after replicating this effect, we show that exposure to triggering also yields retinotopically specific adaptation for subsequent ambiguous launching displays, but that exposure to entraining does not. Collectively, these results reveal that visual processing distinguishes some (but not all) types of causal interactions.

PyHab: Open-source real time infant gaze coding and stimulus presentation software.

Infant looking-time paradigms often use specialized software for real time manual coding of infant gaze. Here, I introduce PyHab, the first open-source looking-time coding and stimulus presentation solution designed specifically with open science in mind. PyHab is built on the libraries of PsychoPy (Peirce, 2007). PyHab has its own graphical interface for building studies and requires no programming experience to use. When creating a study, PyHab saves a folder that contains all of the code required to run the study and all of the stimuli, making each experiment a self-contained, easily shared package. This feature guarantees the ability to replicate a PyHab experiment exactly as it was run. PyHab also has several features designed to support rigorous methodology, such as experimenter blinding and automatic stimulus control. In addition, because it is open-source, PyHab can be modified and improved not only by its developer but by anyone who knows Python.

Immoral Professors and Malfunctioning Tools: Counterfactual Relevance Accounts Explain the Effect of Norm Violations on Causal Selection.

Causal judgments are widely known to be sensitive to violations of both prescriptive norms (e.g., immoral events) and statistical norms (e.g., improbable events). There is ongoing discussion as to whether both effects are best explained in a unified way through changes in the relevance of counterfactual possibilities, or whether these two effects arise from unrelated cognitive mechanisms. Recent work has shown that moral norm violations affect causal judgments of agents, but not inanimate artifacts used by those agents. These results have been interpreted as showing that prescriptive norm violations only affect causal reasoning about intentional agents, but not the use of inanimate artifacts, thereby providing evidence that the effect of prescriptive norm violations arises from mechanisms specific to reasoning about intentional agents, and thus casting doubt on a unified counterfactual analysis of causal reasoning. Four experiments explore this recent finding and provide clear support for a unified counterfactual analysis. Experiment 1 demonstrates that these newly observed patterns in causal judgments are closely mirrored by judgments of counterfactual relevance. Experiment 2 shows that the relationship between causal and counterfactual judgments is moderated by causal structure, as uniquely predicted by counterfactual accounts. Experiment 3 directly manipulates the relevance of counterfactual alternatives and finds that causal judgments of intentional agents and inanimate artifacts are similarly affected. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that prescriptive norm violations (in which artifacts malfunction) affect causal judgments of inanimate artifacts in much the same way that prescriptive norm violations (in which agents act immorally) affect causal judgments of intentional agents.

Knowing When Help Is Needed: A Developing Sense of Causal Complexity.

Research on the division of cognitive labor has found that adults and children as young as age 5 are able to find appropriate experts for different causal systems. However, little work has explored how children and adults decide when to seek out expert knowledge in the first place. We propose that children and adults rely (in part) on "mechanism metadata," information about mechanism information. We argue that mechanism metadata is relatively consistent across individuals exposed to similar amounts of mechanism information, and it is applicable to a wide range of causal systems. In three experiments, we show that adults and children as young as 5 years of age have a consistent sense of the causal complexity of different causal systems, and that this sense of complexity is related to decisions about when to seek expert knowledge, but over development there is a shift in focus from procedural information to internal mechanism information.

Normality and actual causal strength.

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation.

The better part of not knowing: Virtuous ignorance.

Suppose you are presented with 2 informants who have provided answers to the same question. One provides a precise and confident answer, and the other says that they do not know. If you were asked which of these 2 informants was more of an expert, intuitively you would select the informant who provided the certain answer over the ignorant informant. However, for cases in which precise information is practically or actually unknowable (e.g., the number of leaves on all the trees in the world), certainty and confidence indicate a lack of competence, while expressions of ignorance may indicate greater expertise. In 3 experiments, we investigated whether children and adults are able to use this "virtuous ignorance" as a cue to expertise. Experiment 1 found that adults and children older than 9 years selected confident informants for knowable information and ignorant informants for unknowable information. However, 5-6-year-olds overwhelmingly favored the confident informant, even when such certainty was completely implausible. In Experiment 2 we replicated the results of Experiment 1 with a new set of items focused on predictions about the future, rather than numerical information. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that 5-8-year-olds and adults are both able to distinguish between knowable and unknowable items when asked how difficult the information would be to acquire, but those same children failed to reject the precise and confident informant for unknowable items. We suggest that children have difficulty integrating information about the knowability of particular facts into their evaluations of expertise. (PsycINFO Database Record

Figuring out function: Children's and adults' use of ownership information in judgments of artifact function.

Across 3 experiments, we found evidence that information about who owns an artifact influenced 5- to 10-year-old children's and adults' judgments about that artifact's primary function. Children's and adults' use of ownership information was underpinned by their inference that owners are typically familiar with owned artifacts and are therefore likely to know their primary functions. Accordingly, when this inference was undermined-when an artifact's owner was said to be unfamiliar with the owned artifact-ownership was no longer used as a privileged heuristic cue to artifact function. These experiments also revealed age-related differences in how ownership information was prioritized relative to another well-studied source of information known to influence artifact cognition, namely, information about an artifact's original designer-intended function. Specifically, older children and adults were more likely than younger children to prioritize design information over ownership information. Our results suggest that children and adults differ in how they weight the relative importance of these 2 sources of function-relevant information-likely reflecting age-related changes in children's and adults' sensitivity to ownership and design information across development. (PsycINFO Database Record

Causal superseding.

When agents violate norms, they are typically judged to be more of a cause of resulting outcomes. In this paper, we suggest that norm violations also affect the causality attributed to other agents, a phenomenon we refer to as "causal superseding." We propose and test a counterfactual reasoning model of this phenomenon in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 provide an initial demonstration of the causal superseding effect and distinguish it from previously studied effects. Experiment 3 shows that this causal superseding effect is dependent on a particular event structure, following a prediction of our counterfactual model. Experiment 4 demonstrates that causal superseding can occur with violations of non-moral norms. We propose a model of the superseding effect based on the idea of counterfactual sufficiency.

Overestimation of knowledge about word meanings: the "misplaced meaning" effect.

Children and adults may not realize how much they depend on external sources in understanding word meanings. Four experiments investigated the existence and developmental course of a "Misplaced Meaning" (MM) effect, wherein children and adults overestimate their knowledge about the meanings of various words by underestimating how much they rely on outside sources to determine precise reference. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that children and adults show a highly consistent MM effect, and that it is stronger in young children. Study 3 demonstrates that adults are explicitly aware of the availability of outside knowledge, and that this awareness may be related to the strength of the MM effect. Study 4 rules out general overconfidence effects by examining a metalinguistic task in which adults are well calibrated.

Children use temporal cues to learn causal directionality.

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real-world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments.