Infants' representations of others' goals: representing approach over avoidance

What is in an action? Preschool children predict that agents take previous paths and not previous goals

Developmental science has experienced a vivid debate on whether young children prioritize goals over means in their prediction of others' actions. Influential developmental theories highlight the role of goal objects for action understanding. Yet, recent infant studies report evidence for the opposite. The empirical evidence is therefore inconclusive. The current study advanced this debate by assessing preschool children's verbal predictions of others' actions. In five experiments (N = 302), we investigated whether preschool children and adults predict agents to move towards their previous goal (that is, show goal-related predictions) or predict agents to move along the same movement path that they pursued before. While Experiments 1a, 1b and 1c presented young children and adults with animated agents, Experiments 2a and 2b presented participants with human grasping action. An integrative analysis across experiments revealed that children were more likely to predict the agent to move along the same movement path, Z = -4.574, p ≤ 0.0001 (r = 0.304). That is, preschool children were more likely to predict that agents would move along the same trajectory even though this action would lead to a new goal object. Thus, our findings suggest that young children's action prediction relies on the detection of spatial and movement information. Overall, we discuss our findings in terms of theoretical frameworks that conceive of action understanding as an umbrella term that comprises different forms and facets in which humans understand others' actions. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We investigated whether preschool children predict agents to move towards their previous goal or to move along the same movement path that they pursued before. Unlike adults, preschool children predicted that agents would move along the same trajectory even though this action would lead to a new goal. Adults' goal-based predictions were affected from contextual details, whereas children systematically made path-based predictions. Young children's action prediction relies on the detection of spatial and movement information.

Infants rationally infer the goals of other people's reaches in the absence of first-person experience with reaching actions

Does knowledge of other people's minds grow from concrete experience to abstract concepts? Cognitive scientists have hypothesized that infants' first-person experience, acting on their own goals, leads them to understand others' actions and goals. Indeed, classic developmental research suggests that before infants reach for objects, they do not see others' reaches as goal-directed. In five experiments (N = 117), we test an alternative hypothesis: Young infants view reaching as undertaken for a purpose but are open-minded about the specific goals that reaching actions are aimed to achieve. We first show that 3-month-old infants, who cannot reach for objects, lack the expectation that observed acts of reaching will be directed to objects rather than to places. Infants at the same age learned rapidly, however, that a specific agent's reaching action was directed either to an object or to a place, after seeing the agent reach for the same object regardless of where it was, or to the same place regardless of what was there. In a further experiment, 3-month-old infants did not demonstrate such inferences when they observed an actor engaging in passive movements. Thus, before infants have learned to reach and manipulate objects themselves, they infer that reaching actions are goal-directed, and they are open to learning that the goal of an action is either an object or a place. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: In the present experiments, 3-month-old prereaching infants learned to attribute either object goals or place goals to other people's reaching actions. Prereaching infants view agents' actions as goal-directed, but do not expect these acts to be directed to specific objects, rather than to specific places. Prereaching infants are open-minded about the specific goal states that reaching actions aim to achieve.

Children's Reasoning About Empathy and Social Relationships

Across the lifespan, empathic and counter-empathic emotions are shaped by social relationships. Here we test the hypothesis that this connection is encoded in children's intuitive theory of psychology, allowing them to predict when others will feel empathy versus counter-empathy and to use vicarious emotion information to infer relationships. We asked 4- to 7-year-old children (N = 79) to make emotion predictions or relationship inferences in response to stories featuring two characters, an experiencer and an observer, and either a positive or negative outcome for the experiencer. In the context of positive outcomes, we found that children engaged in robust joint reasoning about relationships and vicarious emotions. When given information about the characters' relationship, children predicted empathy from a friendly observer and counter-empathy from a rival observer. When given information about the observer's response to the experiencer, children inferred positive and negative relationships from empathic and counter-empathic responses, respectively. In the context of negative outcomes, children predicted that both friendly and rival observers would feel empathy toward the experiencer, but they still used information about empathic versus counter-empathic responses to infer relationship status. Our results suggest that young children in the US have a blanket expectation of empathic concern in response to negative outcomes, but otherwise expect and infer that vicarious emotions are connected to social relationships. Future research should investigate if children use this understanding to select social partners, evaluate their own relationships, or decide when to express empathy toward others.

Do nonlinguistic creatures deploy mental symbols for logical connectives in reasoning?

Some nonlinguistic systems of representation display some of the six features of a language-of-thought (LoT) delineated by Quilty-Dunn et al. But they conjecture something stronger: That all six features cooccur homeostatically in nonlinguistic thought. Here I argue that there is no good evidence for nonlinguistic deductive reasoning involving the disjunctive syllogism. Animals and prelinguistic children probably do not make logical inferences.

Understanding preferences in infancy

A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Development and Aging.

Socially evaluative contexts facilitate mentalizing

Our ability to understand others' minds stands at the foundation of human learning, communication, cooperation, and social life more broadly. Although humans' ability to mentalize has been well-studied throughout the cognitive sciences, little attention has been paid to whether and how mentalizing differs across contexts. Classic developmental studies have examined mentalizing within minimally social contexts, in which a single agent seeks a neutral inanimate object. Such object-directed acts may be common, but they are typically consequential only to the object-seeking agent themselves. Here, we review a host of indirect evidence suggesting that contexts providing the opportunity to evaluate prospective social partners may facilitate mentalizing across development. Our article calls on cognitive scientists to study mentalizing in contexts where it counts.

Negative mental representations in infancy

How do infants' thoughts compare to the thoughts adults express with language? In particular, can infants entertain negative representations, such as not red or not here? In four experiments, we used pupillometry to ask whether negative representations are possible without an external language. Eleven-month-olds were tested on their ability to detect and represent the abstract structure of sequences of syllables, defined by the relations identity and/or negation: AAAA (four identical syllables; Experiment 1), AAA¬A (three times the syllable A and one final syllable that is not A; Experiment 2), AA(A)(A)¬A (two-to-four times the syllable A and one final syllable that is not A; Experiment 3). Representing the structures in Experiments 2-3 requires a form of negation. Results suggest that infants are able to compute both identity and negation. More generally, these results lend credit to the hypothesis that the infant mind is equipped with rudimentary logical operators before language takes off.

Infants recruit logic to learn about the social world

When perceptually available information is scant, we can leverage logical connections among hypotheses to draw reliable conclusions that guide our reasoning and learning. We investigate whether this function of logical reasoning is present in infancy and aid understanding and learning about the social environment. In our task, infants watch reaching actions directed toward a hidden object whose identity is ambiguous between two alternatives and has to be inferred by elimination. Here we show that infants apply a disjunctive inference to identify the hidden object and use this logical conclusion to assess the consistency of the actions with a preference previously demonstrated by the agent and, importantly, also to acquire new knowledge regarding the preferences of the observed actor. These findings suggest that, early in life, preverbal logical reasoning functions as a reliable source of evidence that can support learning by offering a logical route for knowledge acquisition.

When Children Treat Condemnation as a Signal: The Costs and Benefits of Condemnation

Condemnation is ubiquitous in the social world and adults treat condemnation as a costly signal. We explore when children begin to treat condemnation as a signal by presenting 4- to 9-year-old children (N = 435) with stories involving a condemner of stealing and a noncondemner. Children were asked to predict who would be more likely to steal as well as who should be punished more harshly for stealing. In five studies, we found that 7- to 9-year-old children treat condemnation as a signal-thinking that a condemner is less likely to steal and should be punished more harshly if caught hypocritically stealing later. We discuss the implications of these results for children's emerging understanding of signaling and moral condemnation.

Six-Month-Old Infants Predict Agents' Goal-Directed Actions on Occluded Objects

Infants can infer agents' goals after observing agents' goal-directed actions on objects and can subsequently make predictions about how agents will act on objects in the future. We investigated the representations supporting these predictions. We familiarized 6-month-old infants to an agent who preferentially reached for one of two featurally distinct objects following a cue. At test, the objects were sequentially occluded from the infant in the agent's presence. We asked whether infants could generate action predictions without visual access to the relevant objects by measuring whether infants shifted their gaze to the location of the agent's hidden goal object following the cue. We also examined what infants represented about the hidden objects by removing one of the occluders to reveal either the original hidden object or the unexpected other object and measuring infants' looking time. We found that, even without visual access to the objects, infants made predictive gazes to the location of the agent's occluded goal object, but failed to represent the features of either hidden object. These results suggest that infants make goal-based action predictions when the relevant objects in the scene are occluded, but doing so may come at the expense of maintaining representations of the objects.

Reaching the goal: Active experience facilitates 8-month-old infants' prospective analysis of goal-based actions

From early in development, infants view others' actions as structured by intentions, and this action knowledge may be supported by shared action production/perception systems. Because the motor system is inherently prospective, infants' understanding of goal-directed actions should support predictions of others' future actions, yet little is known about the nature and developmental origins of this ability, specifically whether young infants use the goal-directed nature of an action to rapidly predict future social behaviors and whether their action experience influences this ability. Across three conditions, we varied the level of action experience infants engaged in to determine whether motor priming influenced infants' ability to generate rapid social predictions. Results revealed that young infants accurately generated goal-based visual predictions when they had previously been reaching for objects; however, infants who passively observed a demonstration were less successful. Further analyses showed that engaging the cognitively based prediction system to generate goal-based predictions following motor engagement resulted in slower latencies to predict, suggesting that these smart predictions take more time to deploy. Thus, 8-month-old infants may have motor representations of goal-directed actions, yet this is not sufficient for them to predict others' actions; rather, their own action experience supports the ability to rapidly implement knowledge to predict future behavior.