Hernik, M. and Southgate, Victoria (2012) Nine-months-old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants’ goal-attribution. Developmental Science 15 (5), pp. 714-722. ISSN 1363-755x.
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Abstract
Human infants readily interpret others’ actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent’s future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants’ goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent’s preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent’s preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| 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: | 07 Sep 2012 10:01 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 16:58 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5052 |
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