Seeing it happen and knowing how it works: How children understand the relation between perceptual causality and underlying mechanism

Two experiments studied how 5- to 10-year-olds integrate perceptual causali ty with their knowledge of the underlying causal mechanism. Children learne d about 2 devices by which a ball dropped into one end of a box made a bell ring at the other end, either immediately (contiguous mechanism) or after a delay (noncontiguous mechanism). When 1 ball was dropped first and a 2nd ball was dropped after a delay, and then the bell rang immediately, 5- and 7-year-olds chose the contiguous cause regardless of the mechanism inside. This was not due to lack of specific knowledge or problems with salient dis tracters. The results suggest a link between temporal contiguity and causal ity in children's understanding. Children also considered causal mechanism, in agreement with previous research, but they may not understand that mech anism is superordinate to perceptual cues for causality.