ABSTRACT
A causal situation such as a transitive motion, whichisgrasped fairly quickly by children between the ages of four to ten years, represents a privileged case of the relationship between the understanding and the memory, and is therefore suspect. To be quite certain of our conclusions we must examine the remembrance of a situation that is completely incomprehensible to children in the same age groups. Now, 'incomprehensible' is a relative term: very young or ignorant subjects think that there is nothing they cannot understand. However, far from being a disadvantage, this proves a great help in our case. As fvr the more advanced subjects, they invariably centre their attention on the 'lawful' succession of events-they refuse to accept oversimplified explanations and are not yet capable of appreciating the more intricate causal arguments. This raises the question of whether or not the memory of 'lawful' successions and relationships deteriorates more quickly with time in the absence of a satisfactory causal explanation than it does in its presence. Finally, the new experiment will enable us to look at the emergence of causal explanations proper and of their effects on the memory.
