Albert Michotte.

Michotte, Albert

doi:10.1037/11154-010

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The rational for this manipulation is based on earlier studies of phenomenalistic causal judgements in adults. Michotte (1962) reported that participants judged an object presented as a display on a screen as the same if only one of four features (shape, size, colour of spatial location) was changed. If, however, two or more features were changed simultaneously, participants reported that they believed that the object had been replaced with another.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Permanence of Mental Objects: Testing Magical Thinking on Perceived and Imaginary Realities.

Subbotsky

2005

Developmental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study tested participants' preparedness to acknowledge that an object could change as a result of magical intervention. Six-and 9-year-old children and adults treated perceived and imagined objects as being equally permanent. Adults treated a fantastic object as significantly less permanent than either perceived or imagined objects. Results were similar when a different type of mental-physical causality-a participant's own wish-was examined. Adults were also tested on the permanence of personally significant imagined objects (participants' images of their future lives). Although almost all participants claimed that they did not believe in magic, in test trials they were not prepared to rule out the possibility that their future lives could be affected by a magical curse.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Permanence of Mental Objects: Testing Magical Thinking on Perceived and Imaginary Realities.

Subbotsky

2005

Developmental Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These sorts of specific hard-wired representations could capture particular, important parts of the causal structure of the environment. This is the proposal that Michotte (1962) and Heider (1958) made regarding the perception of physical and psychological causality.…”

Section: Causal Mapsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets.

Gopnik¹,

Glymour²,

Sobel³

et al. 2004

Psychological Review

937

776

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The authors outline a cognitive and computational account of causal learning in children. They propose that children use specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate "causal map" of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or Bayes nets. Children's causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2-to 4-year-old children construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism.The input that reaches children from the world is concrete, particular, and limited. Yet, adults have abstract, coherent, and largely veridical representations of the world. The great epistemological question of cognitive development is how human beings get from one place to the other: How do children learn so much about the world so quickly and effortlessly? In the past 30 years, cognitive developmentalists have demonstrated that there are systematic changes in children's knowledge of the world. However, psychologists know much less about the representations that underlie that knowledge and the learning mechanisms that underlie changes in that knowledge.In this article, we outline one type of representation and several related types of learning mechanisms that may play a particularly important role in cognitive development. The representations are of the causal structure of the world, and the learning mechanisms involve a particularly powerful type of causal inference. Causal knowledge is important for several reasons. Knowing about causal structure permits us to make wide-ranging predictions about future events. Even more important, knowing about causal structure allows us to intervene in the world to bring about new eventsoften events that are far removed from the interventions themselves.

show abstract

“…From early in the 1st year of life, people experience what is known as causal perception. In an influential series of experiments, Michotte (1962) showed that if two physical events are spatially and temporally contiguous-for example, the launching of a billiard ball when another ball collides with it-adults receive a direct impression of the causal relation without requiring repeated exposure to the stimulus. Presentation of Michotte's launching paradigm to infants reveals that they too perceive these relations as causal by at most 10 months of age (Cohen & Oakes, 1993;Leslie & Keeble, 1987;Oakes & Cohen, 1990.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning: Preschoolers use new contingency evidence to overcome prior spatial assumptions.

Kushnir

Gopnik

2007

Developmental Psychology

128

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study examines preschoolers' causal assumptions about spatial contiguity and how these assumptions interact with new evidence in the form of conditional probabilities. Preschoolers saw a toy that activated in the presence of certain objects. Children were shown evidence for the toy's activation rule in the form of patterns of probability: The toy was more likely to activate either when objects made contact with its surface (on condition) or when objects were several inches above its surface (over condition). In Experiment 1, 61 three-year-olds saw a deterministic activation rule. In Experiments 2 and 3, 48 four-year-olds saw an activation rule that was probabilistic. In Experiment 4, 30 four-year-olds saw a screening-off pattern of activation. In all 4 experiments, children used new evidence in the form of patterns of probability to make accurate causal inferences, even in the face of conflicting prior beliefs about spatial contiguity. However, children were more likely to make correct inferences when causes were spatially contiguous, particularly when faced with ambiguous evidence.

show abstract

Albert Michotte.

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

The Permanence of Mental Objects: Testing Magical Thinking on Perceived and Imaginary Realities.

The Permanence of Mental Objects: Testing Magical Thinking on Perceived and Imaginary Realities.

A Theory of Causal Learning in Children: Causal Maps and Bayes Nets.

Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning: Preschoolers use new contingency evidence to overcome prior spatial assumptions.

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About