First-person action experience reveals sensitivity to action efficiency in prereaching infants

Skerry, Amy E.; Carey, Susan; Spelke, Elizabeth S.

doi:10.1073/pnas.1312322110

Cited by 97 publications

(152 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…In other investigations, 3-month-olds succeeded at detour and preference tasks only if they were first primed to focus on the goal of the agent's actions (e.g., Skerry et al 2013;Sommerville et al 2005). In one investigation, for example, infants in the experimental condition first received a brief play session in which they wore Velcro mittens (adapted from Needham et al 2002) that allowed them to pick up Velcrocovered toys by swiping at them (Skerry et al 2013). Next, infants received a detour task involving videotaped events: in the familiarization trials, an agent wearing a similar Velcro mitten reached over a barrier to get a toy and then paused; in the test trials, the barrier was removed and the agent reached for the toy either in a straight line (new-path event) or using the same arching action as before (old-path event).…”

Section: Goalsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…When encouraged to do the same, infants showed some success only if the experimenter had first made clear the goal of her actions by stretching her arm and hand toward the out-of-reach toy, as though vainly trying to grasp it. In other investigations, 3-month-olds succeeded at detour and preference tasks only if they were first primed to focus on the goal of the agent's actions (e.g., Skerry et al 2013;Sommerville et al 2005). In one investigation, for example, infants in the experimental condition first received a brief play session in which they wore Velcro mittens (adapted from Needham et al 2002) that allowed them to pick up Velcrocovered toys by swiping at them (Skerry et al 2013).…”

Section: Goalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Baillargeon

Scott

Bian

2016

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

207

152

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Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret the agent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent. In this review, we first describe the initial demonstrations of infants' sensitivity to the efficiency and consistency principles. We then examine how infants identify novel entities as agents. Next, we summarize what is known about infants' ability to reason about agents' motivational, epistemic, and counterfactual states. Finally, we consider alternative interpretations of these findings and discuss the current controversy about the relation between implicit and explicit psychological reasoning.

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Section: Goalsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Goalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Baillargeon

Scott

Bian

2016

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

207

152

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A large body of work in cognitive development suggests that even infants expect agents to complete their goals as efficiently as possible [2][3][60][61][62][63][64][65]. If for instance, infants are habituated to one agent hopping over a barrier to reach another agent, infants look longer when the agent continues to hop in the absence of a barrier than when she moves in a straight line [2,65].…”

Section: Goal-directed Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Naïve Utility Calculus: Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology

Jara‐Ettinger¹,

Gweon²,

Schulz³

et al. 2016

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

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We propose that human social cognition is structured around a basic understanding of ourselves and others as intuitive utility maximizers: From a young age, humans implicitly assume that agents choose goals and actions to maximize the rewards they expect to obtain relative to the costs they expect to incur. This "naïve utility calculus" lets both children and adults observe others' behavior and infer their beliefs and desires, their longer-term knowledge and preferences, and even their character: who is knowledgeable or competent, who is praiseworthy or blameworthy, who is friendly, indifferent or an enemy. We review studies providing support for the naïve utility calculus, and we show how it captures much of the rich social reasoning humans engage in from infancy. Commonsense PsychologyTheories of decision-making have been at the heart of psychology since the field's inception, but only recently has the field turned to the study of how humans -especially the youngest humansthink humans make decisions. When we watch someone make a choice, we explain it in terms of their goals, preferences, personalities, and moral beliefs. This capacity -our commonsense psychology -is the cognitive foundation of human society. It lets us share what we have and know, with those from whom we expect the same in return, and it guides how we evaluate those who deviate from our expectations.The representations and inferential power underlying commonsense psychology trace back to early childhood -before children begin kindergarten, and often even in infancy. Work on how children reason about other agents' goals [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], desires [9][10][11], beliefs [12][13][14][15][16][17][18], and pro-social behavior [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] has advanced our understanding of what in our commonsense psychology is at work in early infancy [30][31][32] and what develops [16][17][33][34][35]. Nonetheless, major theoretical questions remain unresolved. What computations underlie our commonsense psychology, and to what extent are they specific to the social domain? Are there a small number of general principles by which humans reason about and evaluate other agents, or do we instead learn a large number of special case rules and heuristics? To what extent is there continuity between the computations supporting commonsense psychology in infancy and later ages? Is children's social-cognitive development a progressive refinement of a computational system in place from birth, or are there fundamentally new computational principles coming into play?In this article we advance a hypothesis that offers answers to each of these questions, and provides a unifying framework in which to understand the diverse social-cognitive capacities we see even in young children. We propose that human beings, from early infancy, interpret others' intentional actions through the lens of a naïve utility calculus: that is, people assume that others choose actions to maximize utilities -the rewards they expect to obtain relative to the costs...

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“…A learner could infer that actions are (or are not) efficient with respect to a goal and environmental constraint without imputing any mental states to agents (see Csibra & Gergely, 1998;Gergely & Csibra, 1997; on the "teleological stance" in understanding rational action). Such non-mentalist inferences may indeed underlie some successes at social cognition very early in infancy (e.g., Skerry, Carey, & Spelke, 2013;Sommerville, Woodward, & Needham, 2005). Researchers have similarly proposed that early studies of theory of mind (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon, 2005;Southgate, Senju & Csibra, 2007;Southgate, Chevallier & Csibra, 2010) rely on implicit knowledge distinct from the explicit representations that emerge later in development (e.g., Perner & Roessler, 2012.…”

Section: U(as)=r(s)-c(a)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s understanding of the costs and rewards underlying rational action

Jara‐Ettinger¹,

Gweon

Tenenbaum³

et al. 2015

Cognition

117

121

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Humans explain and predict other agents' behavior using mental state concepts, such as beliefs and desires. Computational and developmental evidence suggest that such inferences are enabled by a principle of rational action: the expectation that agents act efficiently, within situational constraints, to achieve their goals. Here we propose that the expectation of rational action is instantiated by a naïve utility calculus sensitive to both agent-constant and agent-specific aspects of costs and rewards associated with actions. In four experiments, we show that, given an agent's choices, children (range: 5-6 year olds; N=96) can infer unobservable aspects of costs (differences in agents' competence) from information about subjective differences in rewards (differences in agents' preferences) and vice versa. Moreover, children can design informative experiments on both objects and agents to infer unobservable constraints on agents' actions.

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First-person action experience reveals sensitivity to action efficiency in prereaching infants

Cited by 97 publications

References 52 publications

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

The Naïve Utility Calculus: Computational Principles Underlying Commonsense Psychology

Children’s understanding of the costs and rewards underlying rational action

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