Young infants' expectations about self-propelled objects

Baillargeon, Renée; Wu, Di; Yuan, Sylvia; Li, Jie; Luo, Yuyan

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199216895.003.0012

Cited by 19 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Are infants able to view inert objects as agents, as adults are (e.g., the Magic Mirror in the Snow White fairy-tale)? This question has received little experimental attention to date, but preliminary evidence suggests that infants identify an inert object as an agent if it demonstrates autonomous control over its communications (e.g., if it beeps when object-A, but not object-B, is revealed; Baillargeon et al 2009). This initial evidence, paired with the results reviewed in the preceding section and additional findings on infants' expectations about self-propelled objects and animals (e.g., Baillargeon et al 2009;Leslie 1994;Newman et al 2008;Setoh et al 2013), suggests three conclusions.…”

Section: Self-propelled Objects Agents and Animalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Baillargeon

Scott

Bian

2016

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

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Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret the agent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent. In this review, we first describe the initial demonstrations of infants' sensitivity to the efficiency and consistency principles. We then examine how infants identify novel entities as agents. Next, we summarize what is known about infants' ability to reason about agents' motivational, epistemic, and counterfactual states. Finally, we consider alternative interpretations of these findings and discuss the current controversy about the relation between implicit and explicit psychological reasoning.

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Section: Self-propelled Objects Agents and Animalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Baillargeon

Scott

Bian

2016

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

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201

152

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“…Additional results indicated that this was not the case, and that infants continued to view the stationary box as inert even after it beeped in the familiarization trials to demonstrate its preference for object-A over object-B (for details, see Baillargeon et al, 2009b).…”

Section: Can An Agent Be Inert?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Baillargeon¹,

Scott²,

He³

et al. 2015

APA Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 1: Attitudes and Social Cognition.

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IntroductionConsider the following scene: A man wearing a backpack is pacing leisurely back and forth in a large airport room. As he strolls, he occasionally crosses his arms, twirls the dangling straps of his backpack, or stuffs his hands in his pant pockets. At one point, he sits down, takes off his backpack, and removes from it a bag filled with assorted gummy bears; as he peers intently inside the bag, he selects and eats, one at a time, five red gummy bears.As adults, we would have no difficulty interpreting the man's actions. We might view his initial actions-pacing, crossing his arms, and so on-as intentional (as opposed to accidental) though not as directed toward any particular goal. In contrast, we might perceive his subsequent actions-removing the bag of gummy bears from his backpack and eating five red ones in succession-as both intentional and goal-directed. In analyzing these actions, we might build an explanation that attributes to the man a causally coherent set of motivational and epistemic mental states: He wants to eat gummy bears, he is particularly fond of red ones, and so when he spies one in the bag, he removes it and eats it.Next, consider a new scene: As the man is happily chewing on red gummy bears, he notices a second man approaching who is carrying two heavy suitcases. At this point, our scene might unfold according to different scenarios. In one, the first man greets the second man, offers to carry one of the suitcases, and holds out his bag of gummy bears. In another scenario, the first man continues to watch the second man but makes no move to approach him. In yet another scenario, the first man sticks out a leg to trip the second man, causing him to fall heavily.As adults, we would interpret and evaluate the first man's actions in the three scenarios very differently. In the first scenario, we might infer that the two men have a social group in common: They might be friends, coworkers, or relatives, for example. In the second scenario, we 3 would conclude that the two men are strangers. In both the first and second scenarios, we would view the first man's behavior as acceptable: Offering help and sharing food are expected prosocial behaviors in interactions with ingroup, but not outgroup, individuals. In contrast, the first man's behavior in the third scenario would seem to us beyond the pale: Unprovoked harmful actions, even against outgroup individuals, are generally viewed as unacceptable. We would categorize the first man as an antisocial lout, and we might file away distinctive characteristics as possible markers of a social group to be avoided in the future.Our discussion of the two scenes above illustrates the rich analyses that adults spontaneously engage in when watching others act. What are the developmental origins of these interpretations? Over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of research on social cognition in infancy. This research can be roughly organized into two sets of questions that map neatly onto the two scenes above. First, when watching an agen...

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“…Therefore, we used the violation-ofexpectation method to test whether infants would detect a violation when a novel object that was self-propelled and agentive-but not an object that lacked one or both of these properties-was revealed to be hollow. Because there is considerable evidence that infants in the second half-year are sensitive to various cues for selfpropulsion and agency (12,26), our experiments focused on 8-mo-old infants. We reasoned that positive results would support the biological hypothesis by demonstrating that young infants immediately endow novel self-propelled agents with vitalistic, biological properties.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…According to the nonbiological hypothesis, infants do not endow animals with vitalistic or biological properties: animals are simply entities that are self-propelled and agentive [for infants, these two properties are conceptually distinct (12)(13)(14); objects may be self-propelled without being agentive, and they may be agentive without being self-propelled]. Proponents of the nonbiological hypothesis differ greatly in their theoretical views on how infants come to understand self-propulsion and agency.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Young infants have biological expectations about animals

Setoh

Baillargeon

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Significance We provide an experimental demonstration that young infants possess abstract biological expectations about animals. Our findings represent a major breakthrough in the study of the foundations of human knowledge. In four experiments, 8-mo-old infants expected novel objects they categorized as animals to have filled insides. Thus, infants detected a violation when objects that were self-propelled and agentive were revealed to be hollow, or when an object that was self-propelled and furry rattled when shaken, as though mostly hollow. We describe possible characterizations of infants’ expectations about animals’ insides, including a characterization that emphasizes human predator–prey adaptations. We also discuss how infants’ expectation that animals have insides lays a foundation for the development of more advanced biological knowledge.

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Young infants' expectations about self-propelled objects

Cited by 19 publications

References 111 publications

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Psychological Reasoning in Infancy

Psychological and sociomoral reasoning in infancy.

Young infants have biological expectations about animals

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