Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions
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ivc_full_preprint.pdf
Description
Author final manuscript
Size
848.48 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f1d1528bdebba0584ea7a2077350b66a
Author(s)
Liu, Shari
Spelke, Elizabeth S.
Ullman, Tomer David
Tenenbaum, Joshua B
Date Issued
November 2017
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Liu, Shari et al. “Ten-Month-Old Infants Infer the Value of Goals from the Costs of Actions.” Science 358, 6366 (November 2017): 1038–1041 © 2017 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Infants understand that people pursue goals, but how do they learn which goals people prefer? We tested whether infants solve this problem by inverting a mental model of action planning, trading off the costs of acting against the rewards actions bring. After seeing an agent attain two goals equally often at varying costs, infants expected the agent to prefer the goal it attained through costlier actions. These expectations held across three experiments that conveyed cost through different physical path features (height, width, and incline angle), suggesting that an abstract variable—such as “force,” “work,” or “effort”—supported infants’ inferences. We modeled infants’ expectations as Bayesian inferences over utility-theoretic calculations, providing a bridge to recent quantitative accounts of action understanding in older children and adults.
MIT Department
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aag2132
