Cognitive Principles Central To Causality Understanding

Cognitive Principles Central To Causality Understanding Cristina Meini (cristina.meini@lett.unipmn.it) Department of Human Studies, via Manzoni 8, 13100 Vercelli, ITALY Monica Bucciarelli (monica@psych.unito.it) Center for Cognitive Science and Department of Psychology, via Po 14, 10123 Torino ITALY Giuseppe Maurizio Arduino and Francesca Vinai (arduino81@hotmail.com) Center for Autism, ASL 16, via Torino 1, Mondovi (CN), ITALY Abstract Many studies in the psychological literature focus on the distinctive features of physical and psychological causality understanding. Our aim is a preliminary study from a different perspective, looking for similarities in the two domains. The results of Experiment 1 (38 adults participants) confirm our prediction: some features of the perceptual stimulus affect causality understanding in both the physical and the psychological domain. Also, the results of Experiment 2 (16 autistic children and 16 controls) confirm a clinical prediction deriving from our assumption. Autistic individuals, who are notoriously impaired in understanding psychological causality, turn out to be impaired also in understanding physical causality. Keywords: Causality understanding; physical causality; psychological causality. Introduction The notion of causality is central in both the physical and the psychological domains. In the physical realm, the rotation movement of the Earth causes the alternation of night and day, while in the psychological domain the defying glance of a child causes her friend’s wild reaction. In the physical domain, particular attention was devoted to simple launching events such as a billiard ball colliding with and launching another billiard ball – i.e., the same kind of events notoriously studied by the philosopher Hume (1741/1978). Two centuries later, Piaget (1955) studied how children develop causality understanding. An important finding in the most recent literature is that individuals are sensitive to the contingency or temporal contiguity between pairings of a cause and an effect. In other words, cause and effect must be temporally contiguous in order to generate a judgement of causality. A 0.5 seconds delay between an action and its outcome suffices to decrease causality perception in young infants (see, e.g., Spelke, Phillips & Woodward, 1995). In adults, Michotte (1963) observed that the perceptual system assumes cause-effect relations in the absence of contradictory evidence such as the lack of temporal or spatial contiguity, even when there is no real object. In the psychological domain, many studies attempted to understand which perceptual features trigger the perception of agents. Baron-Cohen (1995), for example, purported the existence of the Mindreading System, a cognitive mechanism detecting complex psychological causes of action. One component of the system is the Intentionality Detector (ID), a specialized perceptual mechanism detecting an agent’s goal. Other studies evidenced that eyes are fundamental social and psychological stimuli. It is from the presence of eyes that we immediately recognize agents, and we spontaneously tend to “read” mental states in the eyes of someone. According to Baron-Cohen (1995), eye-like stimuli trigger the Eye Direction Detector (EDD) component of the Mindreading System, that computes the direction of the gaze, finding what the eyes are looking at. ID and EDD trigger SAM (Shared Attention Mechanism), which detects mutual attention and communicative situations. The assumption of specialized mechanisms involved in psychological causality is enforced by clinical data that can be read in terms of an impairment in such a mechanism. In particular, causal psychological understanding is notoriously impaired in autism (see, e.g., Klin, 2000, Klin, Volkmar & Sparrow, 1992). Autistic people generally do not understand the psychological state expressed by a particular glance, nor they understand that a person wants what she is looking at (Baron-Cohen et al., 2001). At a higher level, they do not understand that beliefs cause behavior. On the contrary, autism is not regarded as a syndrome that impairs physical causality understanding (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1986). Some studies revealed a precocious ability to differentiate agents from objects in causal events. For example, Woodward and colleagues (1993) found evidence that 7- month-old infants make a distinction between mechanical forces and animate sources of motion. On the whole, those experimental data show that people not only have precocious causal understanding in both the physical and psychological domains, but also know that the two realms are governed by different principles. An interesting question thus concerns the relation of the two domains of knowledge. Some authors tend to see causal understanding in the physical and psychological domains as completely separated. According to Leslie (1994), for example, the cognitive mechanism ToBy (Theory of Body Mechanism)