ABSTRACT
The key to the involvement of iconic processing in cognitive development is that it gives the original psychological definition of an event. There is a fundamental problem with perceptual data as origins for concepts of agency and causation. The concept of production or generation is common to the theories of action and causation, and is the clearest sign of their common origin. The Humean scheme infants would be represented as basically passive, with ideas of causation merely arising out of repeated experiences of appropriate kinds, without any reasoning or process of understanding. The general orientation taken is that, by the end of the second year, children possess two basic theories about how things happen: the theory of action and the theory of causation. The challenge posed by C. N. Johnson’s account is to find some positive evidence that young children possess theories.
