Department of Psychology, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Dev Psychol. 2013 Jul;49(7):1330-7. doi: 10.1037/a0029620. Epub 2012 Aug 13.
Human adults have a strong bias to invoke intentional agents in their intuitive explanations of ordered wholes or regular compositions in the world. Less is known about the ontogenetic origin of this bias. In 4 experiments, we found that 9- to 10-month-old infants expected a human hand, but not a mechanical tool with similar affordances, to be the primary cause of nonrandom sampling events that resulted in regular color patterns in visual displays. Infants did not have such expectations when the sampling appeared random with no regular compositions in the outcome. These findings provide the first evidence that by about 9 months of age, infants infer the presence of an intentional agent from the perception of regularity.
人类成年人在解释世界上有序整体或规则组合时，会强烈地倾向于引入有意图的主体。但对于这种偏见的起源，我们知之甚少。在 4 项实验中，我们发现 9 到 10 个月大的婴儿期望人手，而不是具有类似功能的机械工具，成为导致视觉显示中出现规则颜色模式的非随机抽样事件的主要原因。当抽样看起来是随机的，结果中没有规则的组合时，婴儿就不会有这样的期望。这些发现提供了第一个证据，表明大约 9 个月大的婴儿可以从规则的感知中推断出有意图的主体的存在。
