The Representation of Third-Party Helping Interactions in Infancy

Abstract

Despite numerous findings on the sophisticated inferences that human infants draw from observing third-party helping interactions, currently there is no theoretical account of how infants come to understand such events in the first place. After reviewing the available evidence in infants, we describe an account of how human adults understand helping actions. According to this mature concept, helping is a second-order, goal-directed action aiming to increase the utility of another agent (the Helpee) via reducing the cost, or increasing the reward, of the Helpee's own goal-directed action. We then identify the cognitive prerequisites for conceiving helping in this way and ask whether these are available to infants in the interpretation of helping interactions. In contrast to the mature concept, we offer two simpler alternatives that may underlie the early understanding of helping actions: ( a) helping as enabling, which requires second-order goal attribution but no utility calculus, and ( b) helping as joint action, which requires efficiency (i.e., utility) evaluation without demanding second-order goal attribution. We evaluate the evidence supporting these accounts, derive unique predictions from them, and describe what developmental pathway toward the mature concept they envisage. We conclude the article by outlining further open questions that the developmental literature on the interpretation of helping interactions has not yet addressed. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 5 is December 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

How do babies come to know what babies know?

“…The task of identifying a teleological relation between the participants of an object-mediated interaction is bound to be more challenging than in the case of instrumental actions (or acts of social engagement) simply because the former, being a more structurally complex event, generates more concurrent goal hypotheses. For instance, typical helping actions (e.g., A helps B to open a box) contain cues of social affiliation (A approaches B and mirrors some of their movements) and first-order instrumental goals (A brings about a change of state in the box), either of which may prime well-formed goal hypotheses that prevent observers from recognizing the teleological dependency between the helper's object-directed efforts and the facilitation of the helpee's goal fulfillment (Schlingloff-Nemecz, Tatone, & Csibra, 2023). Similarly, instances of taking can be reduced to nonsocial acts of object acquisition, disregarding the effects that the action has on the original resource possessor (the takee).…”

Précis ofWhat Babies Know

“…The task of identifying a teleological relation between the participants of an object-mediated interaction is bound to be more challenging than in the case of instrumental actions (or acts of social engagement) simply because the former, being a more structurally complex event, generates more concurrent goal hypotheses. For instance, typical helping actions (e.g., A helps B to open a box) contain cues of social affiliation (A approaches B and mirrors some of their movements) and first-order instrumental goals (A brings about a change of state in the box), either of which may prime well-formed goal hypotheses that prevent observers from recognizing the teleological dependency between the helper's object-directed efforts and the facilitation of the helpee's goal fulfillment (Schlingloff-Nemecz, Tatone, & Csibra, 2023). Similarly, instances of taking can be reduced to nonsocial acts of object acquisition, disregarding the effects that the action has on the original resource possessor (the takee).…”