Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Science. 2017 Nov 24;358(6366):1038-1041. doi: 10.1126/science.aag2132.
Infants understand that people pursue goals, but how do they learn which goals people prefer? We tested whether infants solve this problem by inverting a mental model of action planning, trading off the costs of acting against the rewards actions bring. After seeing an agent attain two goals equally often at varying costs, infants expected the agent to prefer the goal it attained through costlier actions. These expectations held across three experiments that conveyed cost through different physical path features (height, width, and incline angle), suggesting that an abstract variable-such as "force," "work," or "effort"-supported infants' inferences. We modeled infants' expectations as Bayesian inferences over utility-theoretic calculations, providing a bridge to recent quantitative accounts of action understanding in older children and adults.
婴儿知道人们有目标，但他们是如何了解人们更喜欢哪些目标的呢？我们通过反转行动规划的心理模型来测试婴儿是否能解决这个问题，即权衡行动的成本与行动带来的回报。在看到一个代理人以不同的成本平等地获得两个目标后，婴儿们期望代理人更喜欢通过成本更高的行动获得的目标。这些期望在三个实验中都得到了证实，这三个实验通过不同的物理路径特征（高度、宽度和倾斜角度）来传达成本，这表明一个抽象的变量（如“力”、“功”或“努力”）支持婴儿的推理。我们将婴儿的期望建模为效用理论计算的贝叶斯推断，为最近对年长儿童和成年人的行动理解的定量解释提供了一个桥梁。
