Opfer John E
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall 331B, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Cognition. 2002 Dec;86(2):97-122. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(02)00171-3.
To reason competently about novel entities, people must discover whether the entity is alive and/or sentient. Exactly how people make this discovery is unknown, although past researchers have proposed that young children--unlike adults--rely chiefly on whether the object can move itself. This study examined the effect of goal-directed versus aimless autonomous movement on children's and adults' attributions of biological and psychological capacities in an effort to test whether goal-directedness affects inferences across documented periods of change in biological reasoning. Half of the participants (adults, and 4-, 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds; Ns=32) were shown videos of unfamiliar blobs moving independently and aimlessly, and the other half were shown videos of identical blobs moving identically but toward a goal. No age group was likely to attribute biological or psychological capacities to the aimless self-moving blobs. However, for 5-year-olds through adults, goal-directed movement reliably elicited life judgments, and it elicited more biological and psychological attributions overall. Adults differed from children in that goal-directed movement affected their attributions of biological properties more than their attributions of psychological properties. The results suggest that both young children and adults consider the capacity for goal-directed movement to be a decisive factor in determining whether something unfamiliar is alive, though other factors may be important in deciding whether the thing is sentient.
为了能合理地思考新出现的实体，人们必须弄清楚该实体是否有生命和/或感知能力。尽管过去的研究人员提出，与成年人不同，幼儿主要依据物体是否能自行移动来做出判断，但人们究竟是如何做出这一判断的尚不清楚。本研究考察了有目标导向的自主运动与无目的的自主运动对儿童和成年人赋予生物及心理能力的影响，旨在检验目标导向性是否会影响在生物推理中记录的不同变化阶段的推理。一半的参与者（成年人以及4岁、5岁、7岁和10岁的儿童；每组32人）观看了陌生斑点无目的地独立移动的视频，另一半参与者观看了相同的斑点以相同方式朝着一个目标移动的视频。没有任何一个年龄组倾向于将生物或心理能力赋予无目的自行移动的斑点。然而，对于5岁及以上的成年人来说，有目标导向的运动确实引发了对生命的判断，并且总体上引发了更多的生物和心理属性赋予。成年人与儿童的不同之处在于，有目标导向的运动对他们赋予生物属性的影响大于对赋予心理属性的影响。结果表明，幼儿和成年人都认为有目标导向的运动能力是判断某个不熟悉的事物是否有生命的决定性因素，不过在判断该事物是否有感知能力时，其他因素可能也很重要。
