Goal attribution to inanimate agents by 6.5-month-old infants
Csibra, Gergely (2008) Goal attribution to inanimate agents by 6.5-month-old infants. Cognition 107 (2), pp. 705-717. ISSN 0010-0277.
Abstract
Human infants’ tendency to attribute goals to observed actions may help us to understand where people’s obsession with goals originates from. While one-year-old infants liberally interpret the behaviour of many kinds of agents as goal-directed, a recent report [Kamewari, K., Kato, M., Kanda, T., Ishiguro, H., & Hiraki, K. (2005). Six-and-a-half-month-old children positively attribute goals to human action and to humanoid-robot motion. Cognitive Development, 20, 303–320] suggested that younger infants restrict goal attribution to humans and human-like creatures. The present experiment tested whether 6.5-month-old infants would be willing to attribute a goal to a moving inanimate box if it slightly varied its goal approach within the range of the available efficient actions. The results were positive, demonstrating that featural identification of agents is not a necessary precondition of goal attribution in young infants and that the single most important behavioural cue for identifying a goal-directed agent is variability of behaviour. This result supports the view that the bias to give teleological interpretation to actions is not entirely derived from infants’ experience.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Goal attribution, infancy |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Jan 2011 11:39 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 16:52 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/2336 |
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