How do 3-month-old infants attribute preferences to a human agent?

Choi, You-jung; Mou, Yi; Luo, Yuyan

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2018.03.004

Cited by 71 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Future experiments that compare infants' responses to actions that vary in relative inefficiency, and that compare infants' responses to indirect reaching actions constrained by true obstacles (e.g., solid walls) from other objects (e.g., arches or shelves), could help reveal the nature of infants' early understanding of action cost. * With respect to goal-directedness, 6-month-old infants attribute goals to purposeful actions but not accidental ones, and they represent acts of reaching by an agent, but not similar movements of an inanimate object, as goal-directed (16); our studies, like past studies of prereaching infants (26,30,50,51), do not speak to these abilities. Finally, research reveals that 10month-old infants form integrated representations of action costs and rewards (52): If an agent undertakes a more costly action to attain 1 goal object than another, infants infer that the agent values the former goal object more.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 43%

“…What Is the Nature of These Early Concepts? Although our experiments build on prior findings that purport to show that 3-monthold infants, trained with sticky mittens, view other people's actions as goal-directed (26,30,50,51) and costly (27), neither our experiments nor their predecessors reveal how richly prereaching infants represent the costs and goals of other people's actions.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

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Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants

Liu

Brooks

Spelke

2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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We investigated the origins and interrelations of causal knowledge and knowledge of agency in 3-month-old infants, who cannot yet effect changes in the world by reaching for, grasping, and picking up objects. Across 5 experiments, n = 152 prereaching infants viewed object-directed reaches that varied in efficiency (following the shortest physically possible path vs. a longer path), goal (lifting an object vs. causing a change in its state), and causal structure (action on contact vs. action at a distance and after a delay). Prereaching infants showed no strong looking preference between a person’s efficient and inefficient reaches when the person grasped and displaced an object. When the person reached for and caused a change in the state of the object on contact, however, infants looked longer when this action was inefficient than when it was efficient. Three-month-old infants also showed a key signature of adults’ and older infants’ causal inferences: This looking preference was abolished if a short spatial and temporal gap separated the action from its effect. The basic intuition that people are causal agents, who navigate around physical constraints to change the state of the world, may be one important foundation for infants’ ability to plan their own actions and learn from the acts of others.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 43%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants

Liu

Brooks

Spelke

2019

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…arches, or shelves), could help reveal the nature of 3-month-old infants' understanding of action cost. 1 With respect to goal-directedness, 6-month-old infants attribute goals to purposeful actions but not accidental ones, and they represent acts of reaching by an agent, but not similar movements of an inanimate object, as goal-directed (16); our studies, like past studies of prereaching infants (26,30,50,51), do not speak to these abilities. Finally, research reveals that 10-month-old infants form integrated representations of action costs and rewards (52): if an agent undertakes a more costly action to attain one goal object than another, infants infer that the agent values the former goal object more.…”

Section: What Is the Nature Of These Early Concepts?mentioning

confidence: 48%

“…Although our experiments build on prior findings that purport to show that 3-month-old infants, trained with sticky mittens, view other people's actions as goal-directed (26,30,50,51) and costly (27), neither our experiments nor their predecessors reveal how richly prereaching infants represent the costs and goals of other people's actions.…”

Section: What Is the Nature Of These Early Concepts?mentioning

confidence: 81%

Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants

Liu¹,

Brooks²,

Spelke³

2019

Preprint

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We investigated the origins and interrelations of causal knowledge and knowledge of agency in 3-month-old infants, who cannot yet effect changes in the world by reaching for, grasping, and picking up objects. Across 5 experiments, N=152 prereaching infants viewed object-directed reaches that varied in efficiency (following the shortest physically possible path vs. a longer path), goal (lifting an object vs. causing a change in its state), and causal structure (action on contact vs. action at a distance and after a delay). Prereaching infants showed no strong looking preference between a person’s efficient and inefficient reaches when the person grasped and displaced an object. When the person reached for and caused a change in the state of the object on contact, however, infants looked longer when this action was inefficient than when it was efficient. Three-month-old infants also showed a key signature of adults’ and older infants’ causal inferences: This looking preference was abolished if a short spatial and temporal gap separated the action from its effect. The basic intuition that people are causal agents, who navigate around physical constraints to change the state of the world, may be one important foundation for infants’ ability to plan their own actions and learn from the acts of others.

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“…Studies using similar procedures further demonstrate that infants also understand that many goal-directed behaviors have an underlying disposition (such as preference for an object over another). The understanding of the disposition in turn helps infants to explain and predict a person’s goal-directed behaviors (Luo and Baillargeon, 2005; Luo and Johnson, 2009; Sommerville and Crane, 2009; Luo and Beck, 2010; Choi et al, 2018). In these studies, infants were assigned into either the Two Objects or One Object condition.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Great Minds Prefer Alike? Thirteen-Month-Old Infants Generalize Personal Preferences Across Objects of Like Kind but Not Across People

Liu

Sun

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Human preferences are person specific because different individuals do not necessarily have the same preference. Although existing empirical evidence demonstrates that infants have a basic understanding about people’s preferences, there remained one question as to whether infants appreciate that a person’s preference can be generalized to objects that belong to the same kind. This study addressed this gap with 13-month-old Chinese infants. In Experiment 1, infants were first habituated to an actor preferring a target object over a different shaped distractor object. Next, the objects’ position and colors were changed and infants watched the actor from habituation and a new actor each alternated preference between the two objects. Results revealed that infants looked longer at the event when the old actor preferred the distractor object. Throughout the experiment, infants were also presented with additional tests in which each actor requested them to visually identify his or her preferred object. Results showed that infants identified the different colored target object for the old actor but not for the new actor. Experiment 2 removed the additional tests and replicated the results of Experiment 1. Experiment 3 confirmed that 13-month olds could differentiate the two different colored target objects. Together, the present findings provide the first known evidence that 13-month olds expect object preferences to be generalized across objects of like kind but not necessarily across individuals. Such sensitivity to the rules guiding preference generalization could help infants predict people’ behaviors and facilitate more successful social interactions.

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How do 3-month-old infants attribute preferences to a human agent?

Cited by 71 publications

References 43 publications

Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants

Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants

Origins of the concepts cause, cost, and goal in prereaching infants

Do Great Minds Prefer Alike? Thirteen-Month-Old Infants Generalize Personal Preferences Across Objects of Like Kind but Not Across People

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