Goal attribution to schematic animals: do 6‐month‐olds perceive biological motion as animate?

Abstract

Infants are sensitive to biological motion, but do they recognize it as animate? As a first step towards answering this question, two experiments investigated whether 6-month-olds selectively attribute goals to shapes moving like animals. We habituated infants to a square moving towards one of two targets. When target locations were switched, infants reacted more to movement towards a new goal than a new location - but only if the square moved non-rigidly and rhythmically, in a schematic version of bio-mechanical movement older observers describe as animal-like (Michotte, 1963). Goal attribution was specific to schematic animal motion: It did not occur if the square moved rigidly with the same rhythm as the animate stimulus, or if the square had the same amount of non-rigid deformation, but in an inanimate configuration. The data would seem to show that perception of schematic animal motion is linked to a system for psychological reasoning from infancy. This in turn suggests that 6-month-olds may already interpret biological motion as animate.

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

“…When no change occurs in a scene, infants may still perceive a novel entity as agentive if it gives evidence that it is choosing either which target to approach or which (efficient) path to follow to a target. In preference tasks, 6-and 12-month-olds viewed a novel entity as agentive (as evidenced by their looking longer at the new-object event in the test trials) if it "turned" toward object-A before approaching it in the familiarization trials, as though choosing it as its goal object (Johnson et al 2007b;Schlottmann & Ray 2010). In a detour task, Csibra (2008) familiarized 6-month-olds with an event in which a box had to move around an obstacle to reach a target.…”

Action anticipation in human infants reveals assumptions about anteroposterior body-structure and action

“…The box adjusted its path to the exit-path of the ball and followed it off the screen. The box moved in an animate, caterpillar-like pattern of locomotion [39,40], its main axis being always aligned with its direction of movement. There was a symmetrical set of black and white marks (end feature) on the fore-end of the box.…”

Remote control and children’s understanding of robots

“…Infants use features of goal-directed motion to predict the future behavior of agents. For example, they expect objects engaging in goaldirected motion to change direction spontaneously, remain in place after an external force (Luo, Kaufman, & Baillargeon, 2009), and act on other agents at a distance (Schlottman & Ray, 2010). The application of this criterion persists until preschool.…”