Infants' causal learning: Intervention, observation, imitation.

covariation to be understood as fully causal. The concept of an intervention may help us move beyond a debate about the primacy of perception (Michotte) versus action (Piaget) to theories that map observations and actions to the same abstract causal representations. For developmental scientists, one striking feature of the philosophical notion of an intervention is that it is abstract—an intervention can be performed by the self or by another person (or even by a “natural experiment” not involving an agent). We can learn not only through our own interventions on the world, but also by watching the interventions of others. This intriguing idea is incompatible with many classical views of infancy, which explicitly deny the equivalence between observing others and acting oneself. In classical developmental views, we observe others from the outside as a series of movements in space, but we feel ourselves from the inside as yearnings, intentions, and freely willed plans. The way we represent self versus other is fundamentally different. This results in a disconnect between learning by doing Infants’ Understanding of Interventions by Self and Other