You Can't Always Get What You Want

Abstract

When do infants understand that goals exist independently of the actions that result from them? Exploring infants' understanding of failed intentional actions-when the goal of the action is unfulfilled and thus non-apparent in the actor's movements-critically addresses this question. Using a visual habituation paradigm, we assessed when infants understand that a failed intentional action is goal-directed and whether an understanding of successful intentional actions (actions that do overtly attain their goals) precedes an understanding of failed intentional actions. Results demonstrate that 10-and 12-month-olds recognized the goal-directedness of both successful and failed reaching actions. Eight-month-olds also recognized the goal-directedness of successful actions, but failed to do so for unsuccessful attempts. These results show that by the first year of life, infants possess an impressive understanding of intentional action and that an understanding of failed intentional actions follows an earlier understanding of successful ones.A hallmark of human cognition is the ability to transcend information provided by the behavior stream and make inferences about the underlying causes of human action. Indeed, the success of human social interaction rests upon the recognition that people act according to internal mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. An important developmental question is, thus, when do children come to perceive the motions of others as guided by intentions? A critical test for this knowledge is one that involves reasoning about the goal of a failed action. Inferring a goal when it is unfulfilled and thus non-apparent in the actor's movements or the outcome achieved would not be possible without penetrating deeper than the surface appearance of the action. Thus, appreciation of failed action as goal-directed provides firm evidence for understanding that goals exist independently of the particular actions performed. When and how does this understanding develop?Two sets of findings frame this question. First, infants in the second year clearly appreciate the intentions underlying failed actions. The firmest demonstration of this comes from Meltzoff (1995) where, after witnessing an adult try but fail to fulfill several novel, objectdirected goals (e.g., trying to hang a ring on a hook), 18-month-olds read through the actor's bodily movements to the underlying intention of the action. Although infants never saw the actions successfully modeled, when given a chance to act on the objects themselves they "imitated" the successful goal-directed actions much more than the failed (actually witnessed) actions. Replications of these experiments have shown that 15-month-olds (Carpenter et al., 1998) but not 12-month-olds (Bellagamba & Tomasello, 1999) also display

Why (and how) should we study the interplay between emotional arousal, Theory of Mind, and inhibitory control to understand moral cognition?

“…However, in real life, features such as the goal-directedness of the action performed, its controllability (Weiner, 1995), or the agents’s emotional states (e.g., whether she/he is surprised or happy about the results of her/his action; Behne, Carpenter and Tomasello, 2005) may be critical in determining saliency and helping individuals to determine whether someone acts intentionally or not. Since most of the critical features that feed into these decisions are processed using lower-level mechanism that are available early during the development (Brandone & Wellman, 2009; Cannon & Woodward 2012), it is possible that information about agents’ intentions are incorporated much more easily in daily-life settings than in the experimental settings.…”

Mirroring and the development of action understanding

“…In visual habituation experiments, when infants are habituated to repeated examples of an agent acting on a particular goal, for example grasping a ball, they subsequently show longer looking (a response to novelty) to events that disrupt the original relationship between the agent and her goal as compared to events that preserve this relationship while varying the physical details of the agent's movements (see [20] for a review). This pattern of response is evident by three to six months of age for simple instrumental actions, like grasping [21][22][23][24], and by nine to 12 months of age for actions that relate agents to objects at a distance or indirectly, like looking and pointing [25][26][27][28][29], reaching over obstacles [30] or using a tool or means to attain an object [31 -35].…”

The Development of Social Attention in Human Infants

“…For example, infants begin pointing to objects communicatively (Butterworth, 2003;Carpenter et al, 1998); they become upset when their goals are blocked and are pleased when they achieve an intended goal (Fogel, 2011); they seek appraisal from caregivers to regulate their own emotions (Mumme & Fernald, 2003;Sorce, Emde, Campos, & Klinnert, 1985); and they expect social partners to express interest in shared referents . Converging evidence is provided by imitation studies, where infants by 10-12 months of age observe the unsuccessful attempts of a model to perform a goal-directed action (e.g., pulling apart a toy barbell) and then perform the target act in spite of not seeing it (Brandone & Wellman, 2009;Legerstee & Markova, 2008;Meltzoff, 1995). These results suggest that infants can infer the unseen goals or intentions of the model; otherwise, it would not have been possible for them to perform the intended actions.…”