FriSem

David Rose, Fourth-year PhD candidate with Assistant Professor Tobi Gerstenberg, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

Title: Causal verbs and the development of causal cognition

Abstract: There are two different kinds of causes that we reason about: transference-based and dependence-based causes. One key difference between these is, roughly, that transference-based causes require the transmission of some conserved physical quantity from cause to effect while dependence-based causes don’t. Adults recognize differences between these kinds of causes. Indeed, these differences are reflected in the lexicon itself. In particular, lexical causatives, such as “break” and “burn”, seem to encode transmission-based causes that involve a direct relationship between cause and effect, often marked by direct contact. In contrast, “cause” encodes a notion of causation that includes absences—where there is no transmission— as causes, as well as indirect events that don’t directly transmit some conserved physical quantity to an effect. Our question here is focused on how the conceptual mapping of different notions of causation onto the lexicon develops. We present a series of experiments involving causal chains and absences to determine how “cause” and lexical causatives such as “break” and “burn” develop to reflect aspects of transference-based and dependence-based causes.