Which way to take? Infants select an efficient path to their goal

Paulus, Markus; Sodian, Beate

doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2015.03.014

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 73 publications

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“…Gergely, Bı́ró, Koos, & Brockbank, 1999; Gergely, 2003; Sodian, Schoeppner, & Metz, 2004). Infants are able to represent actions in a way that allows them to draw inferences about unobserved states and interpret an action based on the shortest or most efficient path (Csibra, 2003; Gergely, 2003; Paulus & Sodian, 2015; Woodward, Sommerville, & Guajardo, 2001). We tend to readily see others’ behaviors as means to ends (a goal; Csibra, 2008a; Csibra & Gergely, 2007; Csibra, Gergely, Bı́ró, Koós, & Brockbank, 1999; Southgate, Johnson, & Csibra, 2008), even during a failed action (Brandone & Wellman, 2009) or chasing events when the goal is unseen (Csibra, 2003).…”

Section: Habituation Paradigm: History and Foundations Of The Teleolomentioning

confidence: 99%

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future

Juvrud

Gredebäck

2020

Developmental Science

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We review the support for, and criticisms of, the teleological stance theory, often described as a foundation for goal-directed action understanding early in life. A major point of contention in the literature has been how teleological processes and assumptions of rationality are represented and understood in infancy, and this debate has been largely centered on three paradigms. Visual habituation studies assess infant's abilities to retrospectively assess teleological processes; the presence of such processes is supported by the literature. Rational imitation is a phenomenon that has been questioned both theoretically and empirically, and there is currently little support for this concept in the literature. The involvement of teleological processes in action prediction is unclear. To date, the ontology of teleological processes remains unspecified. To remedy this, we present a new action-based theory of teleological processes (here referred to as the embodied account of teleological processes), based on the development of goal-directed reaching with its origin during the fetal period and continuous development over the first few months of life.

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Section: Habituation Paradigm: History and Foundations Of The Teleolomentioning

confidence: 99%

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future

Juvrud

Gredebäck

2020

Developmental Science

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“…One method used to overcome this ambiguity is to offer the infant a choice between a set of potential "means" objects, among which only one allows the "end" object to be retrieved (e.g., a set of strings in which only one is attached to the out-of-reach object). With this protocol, it seems that young infants have great difficulties in choosing the effective "means" object, and if one considers that solving such a multiple means-end problem is a proof of goal-directedness, it seems that goal-directedness is only acquired during the second year of life (e.g., Rat-Fischer et al, 2014;Paulus et al, 2015). The acquisition of goaldirectedness has also been studied through investigation of the baby's understanding of other people's means-end behaviours (e.g., Carpenter et al, 2005;Elsner, 2007).…”

Section: Means-end Behavioursmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sensorimotor contingencies as a key drive of development: from babies to robots

Jacquey¹,

Baldassarre²,

Santucci³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Much current work in robotics focuses on the development of robots capable of autonomous unsupervised learning. An essential prerequisite for such learning to be possible is that the agent should be sensitive to the link between its actions and the consequences of its actions, called sensorimotor contingencies. This sensitivity, and more particularly its role as a key drive of development, has been widely studied by developmental psychologists. However, the results of these studies may not necessarily be accessible or intelligible to roboticians. In this paper, we review the main experimental data demonstrating the role of sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies in infants’ acquisition of four fundamental motor and cognitive abilities: body knowledge, memory, generalization and goal-directedness. We relate this data from development psychology to work in robotics, highlighting the links between these two domains of research. In the last part of the article we present a blueprint architecture demonstrating how exploitation of sensitivity to sensorimotor contingencies, combined with the notion of "goal", allows an agent to develop new sensorimotor skills. This architecture can be used to guide the design of specific computational models, and also to possibly envisage new empirical experiments.

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“…Here, we build on proposals that children's prosocial behavior is best thought of as a decision‐making process (Bridgers, Jara‐Ettinger, & Gweon, ; Sommerville et al., ): one which integrates information about the cost of actions, the rewards they generate, and the social value of the other. Previous research provides evidence that the building blocks of reward‐ and cost‐sensitive decision‐making emerge early in development: Infants and young children tend to pursue the shortest path to a goal (Paulus & Sodian, ), search a location that has more rewards (Feigenson, Carey, & Hauser, ), plan reaches in accord with how much physical effort their actions will require (Upshaw & Sommerville, ), are more willing to help when less physical effort is required (Sommerville et al., ), and are more likely to teach other people things that are high in reward and difficult to learn (Bridgers et al., ). Children are also sensitive to temporal delay as a cost (Kidd, Palmeri, & Aslin, ; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, ), suggesting that they consider not only physical effort, but also opportunity cost (the loss of time available to pursue other rewards), in their action planning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…children tend to pursue the shortest path to a goal (Paulus & Sodian, 2015), search a location that has more rewards (Feigenson, Carey, & Hauser, 2002), plan reaches in accord with how much physical effort their actions will require (Upshaw & Sommerville, 2015), are more willing to help when less physical effort is required (Sommerville et al, 2018), and are more likely to teach other people things that are high in reward and difficult to learn (Bridgers et al, 2016).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Worth the wait: Children trade off delay and reward in self‐ and other‐benefiting decisions

Liu

Gonzalez

Warneken

2018

Developmental Science

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Human prosocial behaviors are supported by early-emerging psychological processes that detect and fulfill the needs of others. However, little is known about the mechanisms that enable children to deliver benefits to others at costs to the self, which requires weighing other-regarding and self-serving preferences. We used an intertemporal choice paradigm to systematically study and compare these behaviors in 5-year-old children. Our results show that other-benefiting and self-benefiting behavior share a common decision-making process that integrates delay and reward. Specifically, we found that children sought to minimize delay and maximize reward, and traded off delays against rewards, regardless of whether these rewards were for the children themselves or another child. However, we found that children were more willing to invest their time to benefit themselves than someone else. Together, these findings show that from childhood, other- and self-serving decisions are supported by a general mechanism that flexibly integrates information about the magnitude of rewards, and the opportunity costs of pursuing them. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/r8S0DGe7f8Q.

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Which way to take? Infants select an efficient path to their goal

Cited by 7 publications

References 73 publications

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future

The teleological stance: Past, present, and future

Sensorimotor contingencies as a key drive of development: from babies to robots

Worth the wait: Children trade off delay and reward in self‐ and other‐benefiting decisions

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