Liu Shari, Spelke Elizabeth S
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, United States.
Cognition. 2017 Mar;160:35-42. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.007. Epub 2016 Dec 29.
Substantial evidence indicates that infants expect agents to move directly to their goals when no obstacles block their paths, but the representations that articulate this expectation and its robustness have not been characterized. Across three experiments (total N=60), 6-month-old infants responded to a novel, curvilinear action trajectory on the basis of its efficiency, in accord with the expectation that an agent will move to its goal on the least costly path that the environment affords. Infants expected minimally costly action when presented with a novel constraint, and extended this expectation to agents who had previously acted inefficiently. Infants' understanding of goal-directed action cannot be explained alone by sensitivity to specific features of agent's actions (e.g. agents tend to move on straight paths, along supporting surfaces, when facing their goals directly) or extrapolations of agents' past actions to their future ones (e.g. if an agent took the shortest path to an object in the past, it will continue to do so in the future). Instead, infants' reasoning about efficiency accords with the overhypothesis that agents minimize the cost of their actions.
大量证据表明，在没有障碍物阻挡路径时，婴儿期望行动者能直接朝着目标移动，但阐明这种期望及其稳健性的表征尚未得到明确。在三个实验（总样本量N = 60）中，6个月大的婴儿根据一条新颖的曲线行动轨迹的效率做出反应，这符合行动者会在环境提供的成本最低的路径上朝着目标移动的期望。当面对一种新的限制时，婴儿期望行动成本最低，并将这种期望扩展到之前行动效率低下的行动者身上。婴儿对目标导向行动的理解不能仅仅通过对行动者行动的特定特征的敏感性（例如，行动者在直接面对目标时倾向于沿着直线路径、沿着支撑面移动）或对行动者过去行动到未来行动的推断（例如，如果一个行动者过去走了最短路径到达一个物体，它将来会继续这样做）来解释。相反，婴儿对效率的推理符合行动者将行动成本最小化的过度假设。
