causal cognition ; cognitive development; agency; folk theories; intuitive biology; conceptual development; intuitive physics; core knowledge
Rakoczy Hannes, Cacchione Trix (2019), Comparative metaphysics: Evolutionary and ontogenetic roots of essentialist thought about objects, in
Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 10(5), e1497-e1497.
Haemmerli Sarah, Thill Corinne, Amici Federica, Cacchione Trix (2018), Domestic horses (Equus ferus caballus) fail to intuitively reason about object properties like solidity and weight, in
Animal Cognition, 21(3), 441-446.
Rakoczy Hannes, Cacchione Trix (2018), Phylogenetic and ontogenetic roots of psychological essentialism, in Vonk Jennifer, Shackelford Todd K. (ed.), Springer, New York, 1-7.
Cacchione Trix, Rakoczy Hannes (2017), Comparative metaphysics: Thinking about objects in space and time, in Call Josep (Editor in chief) (ed.), American Psychological Association, Washington, 579-600.
Amici Federica, Bueno-Guerra Nereida, Cacchione Trix (2017), Understanding of object properties by sloth bears (Melursus ursinus ursinus), in
Animal Behaviour, 217-222.
Cacchione T., Hrubesch C., Call J., Rakoczy H. (2016), Are apes essentialists? Scope and limits of psychological essentialism in great apes., in
Animal Cognition, 9(5), 921-937.
Rakoczy Hannes, Cacchione Trix (2014), The developmental and evolutionary origins of psychological essentialism lie in sortal object individuation, in
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37, 500-501.
The present project deals with the developmental origins of causal reasoning in children. It proposes a specific view to account for the observation that many adults, even well educated experts, never fully abandon the intuitive thought processes of childhood. According to this view, the core foundation of causal thought, which is inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics, guides causal reasoning and the building of folk theories over the entire life span. Specifically, it suggests that a set of core causal constraints pervasively shapes humans’ causal perception, causal language, and cognition. These core constraints include (i) the principle of asymmetric causation that biases humans to interpret causal relations asymmetrically as an agent acting against the resistance of a patient to produce an effect, (ii) the principle of transmission causality that denotes the folk causal notion that agents impose their own causative properties on the patient and (iii) the core ontological distinction between agents (entities who bear/transmit causal energy) and patients (entities who receive/borrow causal energy). The proposed project aims to empirically test the hypothesis that these basic causal elements yield several causal-explanatory principles (i.e., teleology, essentialism, vitalism, impetus) and two common biases (i.e., animistic category error, direct causality bias) in the core domains of intuitive physics and biology. Further, the proposed project shall investigate the hypothesis that these core causal constraints are never fully abandoned, but implicitly coexist with scientific knowledge acquired later in development. To trace the expected inhibitory effects both implicit and explicit behavioral measures shall be employed.