title: 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.
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.
authors.affiliation: Research Department of Educational, Clinical and Health Psychology, University College London, UK. m.hernik@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: Mikolaj
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hernik
authors.forename: Victoria
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Southgate
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001519:Behavior; D002657:Child Development; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006040:Goals; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D033182:Intention; D008297:Male; D012938:Social Perception; D014796:Visual Perception