Laboratory for Developmental Studies, Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Cognition. 2013 Nov;129(2):309-27. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2013.07.006. Epub 2013 Aug 17.
Infants and adults are thought to infer the goals of observed actions by calculating the actions' efficiency as a means to particular external effects, like reaching an object or location. However, many intentional actions lack an external effect or external goal (e.g. dance). We show that for these actions, adults infer that the agents' goal is to produce the movements themselves: Movements are seen as the intended outcome, not just a means to an end. We test what drives observers to infer such movement-based goals, hypothesizing that observers infer movement-based goals to explain actions that are clearly intentional, but are not an efficient means to any plausible external goal. In three experiments, we separately manipulate intentionality and efficiency, equating for movement trajectory, perceptual features, and external effects. We find that participants only infer movement-based goals when the actions are intentional and are not an efficient means to external goals. Thus, participants appear to infer that movements are the goal in order to explain otherwise mysterious intentional actions. These findings expand models of goal inference to account for intentional yet 'irrational' actions, and suggest a novel explanation for overimitation as emulation of movement-based goals.
婴儿和成人被认为通过计算动作的效率来推断观察到的动作的目的，这种效率是达到特定外部效果的手段，例如到达一个物体或地点。然而，许多有意的动作缺乏外部效果或外部目的（例如舞蹈）。我们表明，对于这些动作，成年人推断出代理人的目的是产生自己的动作：动作被视为预期的结果，而不仅仅是达到目的的手段。我们测试了是什么促使观察者推断出这种基于动作的目标，假设观察者推断出基于动作的目标是为了解释那些明显是有意的动作，但不是任何合理的外部目标的有效手段。在三个实验中，我们分别操纵意图和效率，使动作轨迹、感知特征和外部效果保持一致。我们发现，只有当动作是有意的，并且不是达到外部目标的有效手段时，参与者才会推断出基于动作的目标。因此，参与者似乎推断出动作是目标，以便解释其他神秘的有意动作。这些发现扩展了目标推断模型，以解释有意但“不合理”的动作，并为过度模仿提供了一种新的解释，即模仿基于动作的目标。
