Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents’ Action Plans
Name
opmi_a_00063.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
2.43 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
2571c9845bb338d50ca1e09ccd850ecc
Author(s)
Liu, Shari
Pepe, Bill
Ganesh Kumar, Manasa
Ullman, Tomer D
Tenenbaum, Joshua B
Spelke, Elizabeth S
Date Issued
2022
Journal
Open Mind
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Liu, Shari, Pepe, Bill, Ganesh Kumar, Manasa, Ullman, Tomer D, Tenenbaum, Joshua B et al. 2022. "Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents’ Action Plans." Open Mind, 6.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Abstract
Do infants appreciate that other people’s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the danger of its actions, and they learned which goal the agent preferred by observing how much danger it risked to reach each goal, even though the agent’s actions were physically identical and never failed. When we tested younger, 10-month-old infants (N = 102, 52 female, majority White) in a fourth experiment, they did not succeed consistently on the same tasks. These findings provide evidence that one-year-old infants use the height that other agents could fall from in order to explain and predict those agents’ actions.
Do infants appreciate that other people’s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the danger of its actions, and they learned which goal the agent preferred by observing how much danger it risked to reach each goal, even though the agent’s actions were physically identical and never failed. When we tested younger, 10-month-old infants (N = 102, 52 female, majority White) in a fourth experiment, they did not succeed consistently on the same tasks. These findings provide evidence that one-year-old infants use the height that other agents could fall from in order to explain and predict those agents’ actions.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/OPMI_A_00063
