title: Motion, identity and the bias toward agency.
abstract: The well-documented human bias toward agency as a cause and therefore an explanation of observed events is typically attributed to evolutionary selection for a "social brain". Based on a review of developmental and adult behavioral and neurocognitive data, it is argued that the bias toward agency is a result of the default human solution, developed during infancy, to the computational requirements of object re-identification over gaps in observation of more than a few seconds. If this model is correct, overriding the bias toward agency to construct mechanistic explanations of observed events requires structure-mapping inferences, implemented by the pre-motor action planning system, that replace agents with mechanisms as causes of unobserved changes in contextual or featural properties of objects. Experiments that would test this model are discussed.
authors.affiliation: New Mexico State University USA (Retired).
authors.forename: Chris
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fields
keywords: analogy; causal reasoning; infant cognition; mirror neuron system; structure mapping; systemizing