Evidence for “Dumb” Local-to-Global Integration in Children’s Judgments about Motion

We investigated cue use for object movement in preschoolers and adults. Participants’ task was to predict the direction of an object’s motion: whether the object moves across the floor of a room, or whether it floats to the top. While the direction of object motion stayed the same across trials, the types of cues were manipulated to differ along two factors. The factors were (1) spatial proximity (one cue being spatially close to the object, and the other cue being at a distance from the object) and (2) causal relevance (one cue being causally meaningful for the object’s motion, and the other one being causally irrelevant). The results show the following developmental progression: 3-year-olds used only the proximal cue, while 4year-olds used both proximal and distal cue to judge object motion. However, neither group of children distinguished between causally meaningful and causally meaningless cues. Only adults were able to ignore the meaningless cues. The pattern of findings supports the idea that development progresses from local to global integration of pieces of information, with spatial cues being available more readily than causal relevance. The results undermine a common assumption that young children perform on the basis of domain-specific knowledge only.