Infants track action goals within and across agents

Buresh, Jennifer Sootsman; Woodward, Amanda L.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.001

Cited by 153 publications

(209 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Thus, after watching familiarization trials in which agent-A demonstrates a preference for object-A over object-B, infants age 9 months and older hold no expectation about which of the two objects a new agent, agent-B, will prefer (e.g., Buresh & Woodward 2007;Henderson & Woodward 2012). An important exception is that infants do generalize preferences demonstrated in "pedagogical" contexts to other agents (Csibra & Gergely 2009).…”

Section: Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Baillargeon

Scott

Bian

2016

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

211

152

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Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret the agent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent. In this review, we first describe the initial demonstrations of infants' sensitivity to the efficiency and consistency principles. We then examine how infants identify novel entities as agents. Next, we summarize what is known about infants' ability to reason about agents' motivational, epistemic, and counterfactual states. Finally, we consider alternative interpretations of these findings and discuss the current controversy about the relation between implicit and explicit psychological reasoning.

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Section: Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Baillargeon

Scott

Bian

2016

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

211

152

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“…At issue is whether infants recognize that preferences are often attributes of individual agents: Mommy prefers wine, but daddy prefers beer; big sister Jane is fond of reading, but big brother Karl likes sports. To examine this question, Buresh and Woodward (2007) conducted two-object experiments with 9-and 13-month-olds using toys from different taxonomic categories (a toy rocket and a toy animal). The same-agent condition was similar to previous two-object experiments, with agent-A acting in both the habituation and the test events.…”

Section: Are Preferences Agent-specific?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Baillargeon¹,

Scott²,

He³

et al. 2015

APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition.

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IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

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“…Reasoning about intentions and goals develops early in life (Carpenter, Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998;Carpenter, Call, & Tomasello, 2005;Gergely, Nádas-dy, Csibra, & Bíró, 1995;Woodward, 1998), and plays a central role in parsing action sequences Zacks, Tversky, & Iyer, 2001) and predicting others' future behavior (Woodward, 1998;Buresh & Woodward, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%