Infants' attribution of a goal to a morphologically unfamiliar agent.
How do infants identify the psychological actors in their environments? Three groups of 12-month-old infants were tested for their willingness to encode a simple approach behavior as goal-directed as a function of whether it was performed by (1) a human hand, (2) a morphologically unfamiliar green object that interacted with a confederate and behaved intentionally, or (3) the same unfamiliar green object that behaved in a matched, but apparently random manner. Using a visual habituation technique, only infants in the first two conditions were found to encode the approach behavior as goal-directed Thus infants appear able to attribute goals to non-human, even unfamiliar agents. These results imply that by the end of the first year of life infants have a broad notion of what counts as an agent that cannot easily be reduced to humans, objects that are perceptually similar to humans, or objects that display self-propulsion.
Shimizu
Y Alpha
YA
Department of Psychology, Jordan Hall, Building 420, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA. yalpha@stanford.edu
Johnson
Susan C
SC
D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology; D002657:Child Development; D003071:Cognition; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006185:Habituation, Psychophysiologic; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D019370:Observation; D002666:Psychology, Child