Whose fault is it?

For 3- to 6- year-olds

First, your child will look at shapes in a few parts of the screen. After that, they will see videos of shape characters interacting. One character will rush toward another, pushing it forwards so that it hits a cube, which will break from the impact. Following this event, an authority figure will appear to address the situation. Your child won't need to speak or choose anything; we will just be recording where on the screen they look during the silent videos.

How do children understand complex causal chains and assign responsibility? Imagine a scenario where one person pushes another, and that second person falls into an object and breaks it. Whose fault is it that the object broke? Many researchers are interested in whether children naturally trace the responsibility back to the initiator of the event or focus solely on the direct cause. Our research is aimed at testing whether children can distinguish between the direct, physical cause and the ultimate, distal cause.

To do this, we use non-verbal animated shapes to bypass the complexities of language. By recording where your child looks during these events, we can uncover how deeply ingrained and automatic our causal reasoning is. If we find that children naturally focus on the initiator of the chain reaction rather than the direct collider, this would be a very important finding. It would raise a whole host of questions about the different ways we have for thinking about causation. As one example, it might suggest that sophisticated causal understanding develops early and does not strictly require language. Moreover, the way in which these eye movements relate to the events will reveal something profound about the kind of causal understanding that is involved in making intuitive judgments about responsibility.

10 minutes

You will receive a $5 Amazon gift card (for Amazon.com) for participating in this study. To be eligible for the gift card, your child must be in the age range for this study and your child needs to be visible in the study video. Please also note that you must submit a valid consent statement. Each child is eligible to participate in the study and receive a gift card only once. Gift cards will be sent within one week. Please note that we can only offer Amazon gift cards for US residents, but we still invite everyone to participate. Thanks for your understanding.