Actors and actions: The role of agent behavior in infants’ attribution of goals

Johnson, Susan C.; Shimizu, Yukio Alpha; Ok, Su-Jeong

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2007.01.002

Cited by 61 publications

(83 citation statements)

References 34 publications

(24 reference statements)

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“…These findings receive support from several studies that investigate infants' evaluations of past events, all of which focus on the ability to encode the goal of others actions (Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005;Woodward, 1998). Unlike goal anticipation, the ability to encode the goal of observed actions is not limited to human actions (Johnson, Shimitzu, & Ok, 2007;Luo & Baillargeon, 2005;Shimizu & Johnson, 2004). However, infant's ability to encode the goal of observed events are strengthened if the observed events match ones own experiences and manual capabilities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: A dual process account

2010

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a b s t r a c tSix-and 12-month-old infant's eye movements were recorded as they observed feeding actions being performed in a rational or non-rational manner. Twelve-month-olds fixated the goal of these actions before the food arrived (anticipation); the latency of these gaze shifts being dependent (r = .69) on infants life experience being feed. In addition, 6-and 12-month-olds dilated their pupil during observation of non-rational feeding actions. This effect could not be attributed to light differences or differences in familiarity, but was interpreted to reflect sympathetic-like activity and arousal caused by a violation of infant's expectations about rationality. We argue that evaluation of rationality requires less experience than anticipations of action goals, suggesting a dual process account of preverbal infants' everyday action understanding.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: A dual process account

2010

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“…The results of Kamewari et al (2005), Johnson, Shimizu, et al (2007), and Csibra (2008) all indicated that self-propulsion or autonomous motion alone is not sufficient to lead infants to categorize a novel entity as an agent: The entity must provide evidence that it has autonomous control over its actions. These findings left open the possibility that self-propulsion, though not sufficient, is still necessary for infants to view an entity as an agent.…”

Section: Can An Agent Be Inert?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ground-breaking experiments by Johnson and her colleagues (e.g., Johnson, Shimizu, & Ok, 2007;Shimizu & Johnson, 2004) helped shed light on this question. In these experiments, 12-month-olds received a two-object task in which an oval-shaped "blob" 38 covered with green fiberfill stood near the front of the apparatus; at the back of the apparatus were two toys, object-A on one side and object-B on the other.…”

Section: How Do Infants Identify Non-human Agents?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather, infants categorize a novel entity as an agent if it gives sufficient evidence that it has control over its actions. This evidence can take several different forms, including orienting toward and approaching an object in a scene (think of the blob used by Johnson, Shimizu, et al (2007) first turning toward object-A and then approaching it), and responding to a change in a scene (think, for example, of the blob used by Johnson, Shimizu, et al (2007) beeping in response to the experimenter, of the large and small circles used by Gergely et al (1995) expanding and contracting in turn, or of the box used by Luo and Baillargeon (2005a) detecting and approaching the cone).…”

Section: How Do Infants Identify Non-human Agents?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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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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“…According to the core-domain view (15), infants' concept of self-propulsion is part of the skeletal explanatory framework that underlies core physical reasoning: when a novel object gives evidence that it is capable of autonomous motion (e.g., begins to move on its own), infants attribute to the object an internal source of energy, and they appreciate that the object may use its energy to reverse course, resist efforts to move it, and so on (16). Similarly, infants' concept of agency is part of the skeletal explanatory framework that underlies core psychological reasoning: when a novel object provides evidence that it has autonomous control over its actions (e.g., responds contingently to events in its environment), infants attribute to the object motivational, epistemic, and other internal states, and they use these states to predict and interpret the object's actions (17). In contrast, according to the image-schema view (18), infants' concepts of selfpropulsion and agency are formed by a perceptual-meaning-analysis mechanism that redescribes spatiotemporal information into meaningful iconic representations.…”

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confidence: 99%

Young infants have biological expectations about animals

Setoh

Baillargeon

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

121

106

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Significance We provide an experimental demonstration that young infants possess abstract biological expectations about animals. Our findings represent a major breakthrough in the study of the foundations of human knowledge. In four experiments, 8-mo-old infants expected novel objects they categorized as animals to have filled insides. Thus, infants detected a violation when objects that were self-propelled and agentive were revealed to be hollow, or when an object that was self-propelled and furry rattled when shaken, as though mostly hollow. We describe possible characterizations of infants’ expectations about animals’ insides, including a characterization that emphasizes human predator–prey adaptations. We also discuss how infants’ expectation that animals have insides lays a foundation for the development of more advanced biological knowledge.

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Actors and actions: The role of agent behavior in infants’ attribution of goals

Cited by 61 publications

References 34 publications

Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: A dual process account

Infants’ understanding of everyday social interactions: A dual process account

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Young infants have biological expectations about animals

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