Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

If an object A moves until it is adjacent with a stationary objectB, at which point object A stops and object B begins moving,adults and infants 6 months of age and older perceive that Acaused B to move. These “launching” events correspond toreal-world collisions, which are governed by Newtonianmechanics. Previous work showed that infants were sensitiveto Newtonian constraints on relative speed. Here, we show thatinfant causal perception is sensitive to other physicalconstraints on collision events as well. Infants habituated to alaunching event will dishabituate to an event in which object Bmoves at a 90° angle relative to object A, but not to a rotatedversion of the launching event. This selective dishabituationwas not found for non-causal events. The results suggest thatearly-developing causal perception is sensitive to the manyphysical principles of real-world collision events