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

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

doi:10.31234/osf.io/tkgdu

Cited by 7 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 52 publications

(102 reference statements)

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“…First, a manual reaching choice task can be used across this age window, allowing us to fully standardize the task across all infants. Second, infants in this age range demonstrate sensitivity to the causal power of agents (Liu et al, 2019), and to both successful (e.g., Woodward, 1998) and failed goal-directed actions (e.g., Brandone & Wellman, 2009;Hamlin, Hallinan, & Woodward, 2008). Third, although Margoni and Surian (2018) did not find a significant influence of age on infants' preference for prosocial individuals, several successful and failed replications fall within this age range (Hamlin, 2015;Salvadori et al, 2015;.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

Lucca

Capelier-Mourguy²,

Byers‐Heinlein³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Evaluating others’ actions as praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental aspect of human nature. A seminal study published in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life, considerably earlier than previously thought (Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). In this study, infants demonstrated a preference for a character (i.e., a shape with eyes) who helped, over one who hindered, another character who tried but failed to climb a hill. This study sparked a new line of inquiry into infants’ social evaluations; however, numerous attempts to replicate the original findings yielded mixed results, with some reporting effects not reliably different from chance. These failed replications point to at least two possibilities: (1) the original study may have overestimated the true effect size of infants’ preference for helpers, or (2) key methodological or contextual differences from the original study may have compromised the replication attempts. Here we present a pre-registered, closely coordinated, multi-laboratory, standardized study aimed at replicating the helping/hindering finding using a well-controlled video version of the hill show. We intended to (1) provide a precise estimate of the true effect size of infants’ preference for helpers over hinderers, and (2) determine the degree to which infants’ preferences are based on social features of the Helper/Hinderer scenarios. XYZ labs participated in the study yielding a total sample size of XYZ infants between the ages of 5.5 and 10.5 months. Brief summary of results will be added after data collection.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

Lucca

Capelier-Mourguy²,

Byers‐Heinlein³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Second, infants infer preferences on the basis of the amount of effort put toward achieving different outcomes (Liu et al, 2017). Third, infants expect pursuit of an attributed goal to be as efficient as possible (Csibra, et al, 1999;Scott & Baillargeon, 2013;Skerry, et al, 2013;Liu, et al, 2019). And fourth, infants expect an agent who has achieved a goal to have a congruent emotional response: to be happy (Skerry & Spelke, 2014).…”

Section: Commonsense Psychology and Naive Utility Calculusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

Lj¹

2021

Preprint

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To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: we need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that our initial concept of social affiliation, available to human infants, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in a commonsense psychology that treats individuals as rational actors, as formalized in the naive utility calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants’ reasoning about imitation and similarity, helpful and fair individuals, “ritual” behaviors, and social groups, without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general social preference for similar others. This concept of affiliation also offers a new view on the prosocial nature of imitation, placing the value of aligning with someone else’s behavior in the adoption of their goals rather than in mere similarity. I propose further tests of this concept of affiliation, and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to reasoning and learning about social relationships across the lifespan.

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“…Nevertheless, as a rational framework it can be used to uncover inductive biases that simplify the required computations. For instance, the principle of efficient action (Gergely & Csibra, 2003;Jara-Ettinger, Gweon, Tenenbaum, & Schulz, 2015;Liu, Brooks, & Spelke, 2019) assumes that other agents are acting in the most efficient manner towards achieving their aims, greatly constraining the hypothesis space for IRL inference.…”

Section: Value Inference and Cached Valuementioning

confidence: 99%

Representational exchange in human social learning: Balancing efficiency and flexibility

Cm¹,

Vélez²,

Cushman³

2021

Preprint

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What makes human social learning so powerful? While past accounts have sometimes prioritized finding the single capacity that makes the largest difference, our social learning abilities span a wide spectrum of capacities from the high-fidelity imitation of behaviors to inferring and learning from hidden mental states. Here, we propose that the power of human social learning lies not within a single capacity, but in our ability to flexibly arbitrate between different computations and to integrate their outputs. In particular, learners can directly copy the demonstrator’s actions in the absence of causal insight (policy imitation), infer their instrumental values (value inference), or infer their model of the world and intrinsic rewards (belief inference and reward inference). Each of these strategies trades off the cost of computation against the flexibility and compositionality of its outputs. Crucially, we have the capacity to arbitrate and exchange information between these representational formats. Human social learning, we suggest, is powerful not just because of the way it moves information between minds, but also because of the way it flexibly moves information within them.

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

Cited by 7 publications

References 52 publications

Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

Representational exchange in human social learning: Balancing efficiency and flexibility

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