Research Department of Educational, Clinical and Health Psychology, University College London, UK.
Dev Sci. 2012 Sep;15(5):714-22. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2012.01151.x. Epub 2012 May 31.
Human infants readily interpret others' actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent's future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants' goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent's preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent's preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.
人类婴儿能够轻易地将他人的行为解释为有目的的，并根据他们对先前目标的理解来预测在变化的情境下，行为者未来有目的的行为。根据最近的一项提议（Luo & Baillargeon, 2005），如果情境变化涉及扩大行为者可选择的选项范围，并且行为者在这个扩大的选项范围内的偏好未知，那么婴儿的目标归因不足以支持这种预测。本研究通过证明 9 个月大的婴儿即使在有更多可供选择的选项，但没有与偏好相关的证据的情况下，仍期望行为者继续朝着先前的目标行动，从而否定了这一观点。我们的结论是，婴儿不需要了解行为者的偏好，就能够形成对其有目的的行为的预测。本文还讨论了行为持续和行为选择在其中的作用。
