Nine-months-old Infants Do Not Need to Know What the Agent Prefers in Order to Reason About Its Goals: on the Role of Preference and Persistence in Infants' Goal-attribution

Overview

Journal Dev Sci

Specialty Psychology

Date 2012 Aug 29

PMID 22925518

Citations 15

Authors

Mikolaj Hernik

Victoria Southgate

Affiliations

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Abstract

Human infants readily interpret others' actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent's future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants' goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent's preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent's preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.

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