Department of Cognitive Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest H-1064, Hungary.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2013 Oct;116(2):471-86. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2012.12.003. Epub 2013 Mar 15.
The principle of rationality has been invoked to explain that infants expect agents to perform the most efficient means action to attain a goal. It has also been demonstrated that infants take into account the efficiency of observed actions to achieve a goal outcome when deciding whether to reenact a specific behavior or not. It is puzzling, however, that they also tend to imitate an apparently suboptimal unfamiliar action even when they can bring about the same outcome more efficiently by applying a more rational action alternative available to them. We propose that this apparently paradoxical behavior is explained by infants' interpretation of action demonstrations as communicative manifestations of novel and culturally relevant means actions to be acquired, and we present empirical evidence supporting this proposal. In Experiment 1, we found that 14-month-olds reenacted novel arbitrary means actions only following a communicative demonstration. Experiment 2 showed that infants' inclination to reproduce communicatively manifested novel actions is restricted to behaviors they can construe as goal-directed instrumental acts. The study also provides evidence that infants' reenactment of the demonstrated novel actions reflects epistemic motives rather than purely social motives. We argue that ostensive communication enables infants to represent the teleological structure of novel actions even when the causal relations between means and end are cognitively opaque and apparently violate the efficiency expectation derived from the principle of rationality. This new account of imitative learning of novel means shows how the teleological stance and natural pedagogy--two separate cognitive adaptations to interpret instrumental versus communicative actions--are integrated as a system for learning socially constituted instrumental knowledge in humans.
理性原则被援引用来解释婴儿期望代理人采取最有效的手段来实现目标。也有研究表明，婴儿在决定是否再现特定行为时，会考虑观察到的行为的效率，以达到目标结果。然而，令人困惑的是，即使他们可以通过应用更合理的替代行动来更有效地达到相同的结果，他们也倾向于模仿明显次优的不熟悉的行动。我们提出，这种明显矛盾的行为可以通过婴儿对行为示范的解释来解释，即作为要获得的新颖和文化相关手段的交际表现，我们提出了支持这一建议的实证证据。在实验 1 中，我们发现 14 个月大的婴儿仅在交际示范后才会再现新颖的任意手段动作。实验 2 表明，婴儿复制交际表现出的新颖动作的倾向仅限于他们可以理解为有目标的工具行为。该研究还提供了证据，证明婴儿对所展示的新颖动作的再现反映了认知动机，而不仅仅是纯粹的社会动机。我们认为，说明性交际使婴儿能够表示新颖动作的目的论结构，即使手段和目的之间的因果关系在认知上是不透明的，并且明显违反了源自理性原则的效率预期。这种对新颖手段的模仿学习的新解释表明，目的论立场和自然教学法（解释工具与交际动作的两个独立认知适应）如何作为一个系统整合起来，以学习人类社会构成的工具知识。
