Infants’ representations of others’ goals: Representing approach over avoidance

Abstract

Goals fall into two broad types – approach and avoidance. Research on infants’ early goal understanding has focused only on approach goals, usually assuming that infants will encode an ambiguous display where an actor picks one object over another as the actor wanting to approach the former rather than avoid the latter. We investigated infants’ understanding of approach and avoidance separately by presenting 7-month-olds with a hand either consistently approaching, or consistently avoiding, an object. Infants dishabituated to a disruption of the consistent approach pattern, but not of the consistent avoidance pattern. In the second experiment, we show that 14-month-olds, who have a richer understanding of goals, still do not dishabituate when a hand first reaches to and picks up an object it has consistently avoided before. A third experiment found that 7-month-olds successfully dishabituated to the first motion of a previously stationary object when all the objects moved on their own with no hand present, ruling out several low-level interpretations of infants’ failure to dishabituate to the violations of the avoidance pattern in Experiments 1 and 2. We conclude that infants do not represent avoidance from the same type of evidence they can use to represent approach.

Reaching the goal: Active experience facilitates 8-month-old infants’ prospective analysis of goal-based actions

“…During the first postnatal year, infants have the components of what would be needed to generate goal-based predictions. Visual habituation experiments have indicated that infants encode the goal structure of reaching actions by 6 months of age (e.g., Biro & Leslie, 2007; Feiman, Carey, & Cushman, 2015; Luo & Johnson, 2009; Woodward, 1998, 1999), and as described earlier, infants, visually anticipate reaching movements between 6 to 8 months (Gredebäck & Melinder, 2010; Kanakogi & Itakura, 2010; Kochukhova & Gredebäck, 2010; Rohlfing et al, 2012). When do infants put these two components together?…”

When Children Treat Condemnation as a Signal: The Costs and Benefits of Condemnation

“…One possibility is that younger children may have trouble reasoning about people expressing a dispreference-they inferred that someone who expressed a positive attitude about an action would engage in that action, but they did not predict that someone who expressed a negative attitude about an action would avoid that action. In line with this possibility, there is work demonstrating that young toddlers struggle more with inferring dispreference than preference (Feiman, Carey, & Cushman, 2015). However, we believe that this is fairly unlikely for two reasons: first, given that the children tested here were much older than toddlers (i.e., 4-to 6year-olds) and that, in general, even infants and young children are attentive to others' negative affect and use it to guide their own behavior (for review, see Vaish, Grossmann, & Woodward, 2008), we think it is highly unlikely that children are generally unable to make predictions based on dispreference.…”

Logical reasoning by a Grey parrot? A case study of the disjunctive syllogism

“…One such study might be to search for evidence for negation functions that do not involve crossing out an option -for example, could Griffin learn two rules, that X predicts something on the left and that anything that is not an X predicts something on the right? Interestingly, several attempts to find such behaviour in human infants have failed -they learn the affirmative rule but not the negative one (e.g., Feiman et al, 2015;Hochmann et al, 2018). Similarly, could Griffin learn a rule conditioned on the relation of exclusive or?…”