title: Children's understanding of the costs and rewards underlying rational action.
abstract: Humans explain and predict other agents' behavior using mental state concepts, such as beliefs and desires. Computational and developmental evidence suggest that such inferences are enabled by a principle of rational action: the expectation that agents act efficiently, within situational constraints, to achieve their goals. Here we propose that the expectation of rational action is instantiated by a naïve utility calculus sensitive to both agent-constant and agent-specific aspects of costs and rewards associated with actions. In four experiments, we show that, given an agent's choices, children (range: 5-6 year olds; N=96) can infer unobservable aspects of costs (differences in agents' competence) from information about subjective differences in rewards (differences in agents' preferences) and vice versa. Moreover, children can design informative experiments on both objects and agents to infer unobservable constraints on agents' actions.
authors: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
authors: Julian
authors: J
authors: Jara-Ettinger
authors: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, United States.
authors: Hyowon
authors: H
authors: Gweon
authors: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
authors: Joshua B
authors: JB
authors: Tenenbaum
authors: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
authors: Laura E
authors: LE
authors: Schulz
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012201:Reward; D012938:Social Perception; D013850:Thinking / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Action understanding; Cognitive development; Naïve utility calculus; Rational action; Social cognition; Theory of mind