ABSTRACT
One might say that the 12-month-old recognizes intentional relations but only to the extent that she can share such a relation with an interactive partner. For the 1-year-old, intentional relations exist in the interaction and are not a property of, or descriptive of, individuals. Like intentional relations, causal relations involve a relation between an agent and an object, albeit one that is based on the physical rather than psychological properties of the agent. In an ingenious series of experiments, Cohen and Oakes showed that 10-month-old infants are sensitive to the characteristics of the object serving as the agent and the type of action, but not to the characteristics of the object serving as the recipient of the causal event.
