Barrett H Clark, Behne Tanya
Department of Anthropology, University of California, 341 Haines Hall, Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Cognition. 2005 Jun;96(2):93-108. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2004.05.004. Epub 2004 Dec 19.
An important problem faced by children is discriminating between entities capable of goal-directed action, i.e. intentional agents, and non-agents. In the case of discriminating between living and dead animals, including humans, this problem is particularly difficult, because of the large number of perceptual cues that living and dead animals share. However, there are potential costs of failing to discriminate between living and dead animals, including unnecessary vigilance and lost opportunities from failing to realize that an animal, such as an animal killed for food, is dead. This might have led to the evolution of mechanisms specifically for distinguishing between living and dead animals in terms of their ability to act. Here we test this hypothesis by examining patterns of inferences about sleeping and dead organisms by Shuar and German children between 3 and 5-years old. The results show that by age 4, causal cues to death block agency attributions to animals and people, whereas cues to sleep do not. The developmental trajectory of this pattern of inferences is identical across cultures, consistent with the hypothesis of a living/dead discrimination mechanism as a reliably developing part of core cognitive architecture.
儿童面临的一个重要问题是区分能够进行目标导向行动的实体，即有意向的主体，和非主体。在区分包括人类在内的有生命和无生命的动物时，这个问题尤其困难，因为有生命和无生命的动物有大量共同的感知线索。然而，无法区分有生命和无生命的动物会有潜在代价，包括不必要的警惕，以及因未意识到动物（如被宰杀作为食物的动物）已死亡而错失机会。这可能导致专门用于根据行动能力区分有生命和无生命动物的机制的进化。在此，我们通过研究3至5岁的舒阿尔族和德国儿童对睡眠和死亡生物体的推理模式来检验这一假设。结果表明，到4岁时，死亡的因果线索会阻止将能动性归因于动物和人，而睡眠线索则不会。这种推理模式的发展轨迹在不同文化中是相同的，这与作为核心认知结构可靠发展部分的有生命/无生命辨别机制的假设一致。
