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

Liu, Shari; Brooks, Neon; Spelke, Elizabeth S.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1904410116

Cited by 66 publications

(75 citation statements)

References 64 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…We found general similarity between event representations in high-level regions of adults and infants, which can perhaps be understood in light of the sensitivity of infants to goal-directed actions and events (Levine et al, 2019). Young infants both predict the outcomes of actions (Woodward, 1998) and are surprised by ineffcient paths towards a goal (Liu et al, 2019) when a causal agent is involved. Unambiguous agency also increases the ability of older infants to learn statistical structure (Monroy et al, 2017), suggesting that the infant mind may prioritize agency.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

Skalaban

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although sensory input is continuous, we perceive and remember discrete events. Event segmentation has been studied extensively in adults, but little is known about how the youngest minds experience the world. The main impediment to studying event segmentation in infants has been a reliance on explicit parsing tasks that are not possible at this age. fMRI has recently proven successful at measuring adult event segmentation during task-free, naturalistic perception. Applied to infants, this could reveal the nature of their event segmentation, from low-level sensory transients to high-level cognitive boundaries. We collected fMRI data from 25 adults and 25 infants less than one year of age watching the same short movie. Neural events were defined by the stability of voxel activity patterns. In adults, we replicated a hierarchical gradient of event timescales, from shorter events in early visual regions to longer events in later visual and narrative regions. In infants, however, longer events were found throughout the brain, including in a second dataset. Infant event structure fit adult data and vice versa, but adult behavioral boundaries were differently expressed in adult and infant brains. These findings have implications for the nature of infant experience and cognition.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

Skalaban

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Woodward (2000) suggested that it is the understanding of relational structure of actions that provides infants with word-world mappings. From early on, infants appreciate that objectdirected actions express meaningful relations between agents and the targeted objects (e.g., Woodward, 1998Woodward, , 1999Skerry et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2019). Hence, action analysis could serve as a filter for potential referents.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonverbal action interpretation guides novel word disambiguation in 12-month-olds

Pomiechowska¹,

Csibra²

2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Whether young infants can exploit socio-pragmatic information to interpret new words is a matter of debate. Based on findings and theories from the action interpretation literature, we hypothesized that 12-month-olds should distinguish communicative object-directed actions expressing reference from instrumental object-directed actions indicative of one’s goals, and selectively use the former to identify referents of novel linguistic expressions. This hypothesis was tested across four eye-tracking experiments. Infants watched pairs of unfamiliar objects, one of which was first targeted by either a communicative action (e.g., pointing) or an instrumental action (e.g., grasping) and then labeled with a novel word. As predicted, infants fast-mapped the novel words onto the targeted objects after pointing (Experiments 1 and 4) but not after grasping (Experiment 2) unless the grasping action was preceded by an ostensive signal (Experiment 3). Moreover, whenever infants mapped a novel word onto the object indicated by a communicative action, they tended to map a different novel word onto the distractor object, displaying a mutual exclusivity effect. This reliance on nonverbal action interpretation in the disambiguation of novel words indicates that socio-pragmatic inferences about reference likely supplement associative and statistical learning mechanisms from the outset of word learning.

show abstract

“…One example is the notion of causality (Michotte, 1963): causation is understood in infancy both in the physical (collisions) and in the social domain (goals) even before infants are able to reach (Liu et al, 2019). However, understanding mental causation, that is, conceiving and explaining the behavior of others as driven by intentions, beliefs and desires, an ability often called mentalization, is a piecemeal process.…”

Section: The Cognitive Capacities Underlying Folk Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fluffy metaphors of an overheated debate: Why climate change is neither communicated nor understood as an existential threat?

Forgács¹,

Pléh²

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Metaphors of climate change, as many other scientific metaphors, are often inaccurate, if not in their intended content but in their form and emotional valence. A literal ‘greenhouse’ is an eloquent construction designed to preserve heat, ‘warmth’ is an overall positive notion (as opposed to ‘overheating’). First, we are going to overview how metaphors are comprehended, from their neural processing to their use in communication in an attempt to describe their working. Next, we are going explore how metaphors in science deliver messages and how they spread, focusing on two powerful metaphors: an identical replication theory (memetics), and a vision constant reformulation through viral spreading (epidemiology). The form-content distinction is particularly relevant to how scientific metaphors frame debates via their spreading: it is the form that is transmitted, but which are the analogous parts of the content that should be carried over? We then turn to the challenges of climate communication: the reasons for climate metaphors not fulfilling their purpose (e.g., due to the implications of their literal reading); the hostile environment the fossil fuel industry has created for climate scientists (e.g., disinformation and defamation campaigns); the strategies climate scientist could adapt as a community to inform the public and decision makers of the looming cataclysm (e.g., finding a unitary voice as a group with privileged access to specialized knowledge). Next, we are going to address the dire, literal consequences of climate destruction and present ideas on how metaphors and expressions could be improved to transmit a message appalling enough to prompt action. We conclude by an overview of cognitive limitations of everyday thinking and mechanisms of inferential communication to provide ideas for science communicators in persuading contemporaries. Scientists and science journalists should choose their metaphors particularly carefully regarding climate change, as minor misconceptions are leading mankind towards collective extinction.

show abstract

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

Cited by 66 publications

References 64 publications

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

Nonverbal action interpretation guides novel word disambiguation in 12-month-olds

Fluffy metaphors of an overheated debate: Why climate change is neither communicated nor understood as an existential threat?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About