“Let’s work together”: What do infants understand about collaborative goals?

Henderson, Annette M. E.; Woodward, Amanda L.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2011.05.008

Cited by 67 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…In particular, we tend to think that if agents move together, they must be doing so intentionally (Ip et al, 2006;Lakens, 2010). We seem to be able to recognize, as early as at 14 months, when individuals engage in a complex intentional interaction and work together to achieve a shared goal (Henderson & Woodward, 2011). Once interacting individuals are perceived as a unity, they may sometimes be attributed a group-mind, allowing the observer to explain the behavior of the group in terms of group-level mental states (Waytz & Young, 2012).…”

Section: Shared Intentionsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Eskenazi

Rueschemeyer

Lange

et al. 2015

Cortex

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Studies on the neural bases of action perception have largely focused on the perception of individual actions. Little is known about perception of joint actions where two or more individuals coordinate their actions based on a shared intention. In this fMRI study we asked whether observing situations where two individuals act on a shared intention elicits a different neural response than observing situations where individuals act on their independent parallel intentions. We compared the neural response to perceptually identical yet intentionally ambiguous actions observed in varying contexts. A dialog between two individuals conveyed either a shared intention or two independent parallel intentions. The dialogs were followed by an identical video clip where the two individuals performed certain actions. In one task condition participants tracked the intentions of the actors, in the other, they monitored moving colored dots placed on the same videos. We found that in the intention task versus the color task, observing joint actions based on shared intentions activated the temporal poles, precuneus, and the ventral striatum compared to observing interactions based on parallel intentions. Precuneus and the temporal poles are thought to support mental state reasoning, the latter with a more specific role in retrieving memories associated with social scripts. Activation in the ventral striatum, an area involved in reward processing, likely indicates a hedonistic response to observed shared intentional relations similarly to those experienced when personally sharing mental states with others.

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Section: Shared Intentionsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Eskenazi

Rueschemeyer

Lange

et al. 2015

Cortex

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There is increasing evidence that children begin to participate in joint activities early in ontogeny, suggesting that they are both motivated to act together with others and able to coordinate their actions with others. Already in their second year of life, infants engage in collaborative activities with adults such as in ritualized or even novel social games and simple problem-solving tasks [2]–[6]. Somewhat later, at the beginning of their third year of life, they also begin to act jointly with same-aged peers [7]–[13].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three-Year-Olds’ Understanding of the Consequences of Joint Commitments

2013

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Here we investigate the extent of children’s understanding of the joint commitments inherent in joint activities. Three-year-old children either made a joint commitment to assemble a puzzle with a puppet partner, or else the child and puppet each assembled their own puzzle. Afterwards, children who had made the joint commitment were more likely to stop and wait for their partner on their way to fetch something, more likely to spontaneously help their partner when needed, and more likely to take over their partner’s role when necessary. There was no clear difference in children’s tendency to tattle on their partner’s cheating behavior or their tendency to distribute rewards equally at the end. It thus appears that by 3 years of age making a joint commitment to act together with others is beginning to engender in children a “we”-intentionality which holds across at least most of the process of the joint activity until the shared goal is achieved, and which withstands at least some of the perturbations to the joint activity children experience.

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“…One important question raised by the previous experiments conducted by Henderson and Woodward (2011) is whether 14-month-olds in the studies discern the collaborative goal simply by observing the collaborative activity because of the likely possibility that they had participated in these types of collaborative activities in the past. That is, an infant's own actions might provide a model for understanding others’ actions and thus, Henderson and Woodward's findings might only be a reflection of infants’ ability to engage in collaborative action.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Active Experience Shapes 10‐Month‐Old Infants’ Understanding of Collaborative Goals

Henderson

Wang

Matz

et al. 2012

Infancy

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Collaborative activities in which individuals coordinate their actions to attain a common goal play a fundamental role in our everyday lives. Evidence suggests that infants engage in collaborative activities before their first birthday, however little is known about infants’ understanding of collaborative action. Using a visual habituation paradigm, this research consists of two experiments designed to investigate whether 10-month-olds understand that the actions of collaborative partners are critical to the attainment of a common goal. The results of Experiment 1 suggest that 10-month-olds represent the actions of collaborating partners in terms of a common collaborative goal only after receiving active experience with a collaborative activity. Experiment 2 demonstrated that infants who received active experience with a collaborative activity viewed active engagement in a collaboration as being critical for an individual's actions to be interpreted as being directed towards a collaborative goal. Together, these findings demonstrate that 10-month-olds exhibit an understanding of the shared nature of collaborative goals after a highly salient experience with the activity. Identifying the effects of experience on infants’ understanding of collaborative goals in a laboratory context provides insights into the role that experiences in their everyday lives might play in their understanding of collaboration.

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“Let’s work together”: What do infants understand about collaborative goals?

Cited by 67 publications

References 39 publications

Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Neural correlates of observing joint actions with shared intentions

Three-Year-Olds’ Understanding of the Consequences of Joint Commitments

Active Experience Shapes 10‐Month‐Old Infants’ Understanding of Collaborative Goals

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