Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others

Abstract

This paper has been accepted and is in press at Child Development.

Toddlers Prefer Agents Who Help Those Facing Harder Tasks

“…Thus, the choice test was more socially directed at the toddler than were the final events; we take the choice test as a measure of social engagement with the different agents, and the final event looking times as a measure of interest in or processing of each of the full final events. These interpretations are consistent with past research in which infants and toddlers looked longer at prosocial agents, but attended equally to events in which agents engaged in prosocial and antisocial actions (Hamlin et al, 2010 ; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011 ; Woo & Spelke, 2023a , 2023b ).…”

“…Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted Experiments 2 and 3 using online methods via a video conference software (Zoom). Because we could not elicit reaching behavior to physical objects over video calls, we instead probed toddlers’ evaluations by measuring how long toddlers chose to look at the two helpers using a preferential looking test, following prior research that used this measure to assess infants’ social evaluation in traditional laboratory settings (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011 ; Hamlin et al, 2010 ) and more recently in online experiments with infants and toddlers (Woo & Spelke, 2023a , 2023b ).…”

How do babies come to know what babies know?

“…Here, infants chose between an imitative helper and a mere imitator, and consistently selected the helper. In a study from Spelke's own laboratory led by her former student Brandon Woo (Woo & Spelke, 2023), 8-month-olds were led to infer that an agent's goal was one of the two possible options, either to open a specific box or to obtain a specific toy. Subsequently, one agent facilitated the goal they inferred the agent to have, whereas the other agent facilitated the other goal; critically for the present purposes, in one condition the helpful agent was less imitative.…”

Précis ofWhat Babies Know

“…Here, infants chose between an imitative helper and a mere imitator, and consistently selected the helper. In a study from Spelke's own laboratory led by her former student Brandon Woo (Woo & Spelke, 2023), 8-month-olds were led to infer that an agent's goal was one of the two possible options, either to open a specific box or to obtain a specific toy. Subsequently, one agent facilitated the goal they inferred the agent to have, whereas the other agent facilitated the other goal; critically for the present purposes, in one condition the helpful agent was less imitative.…”