Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Infancy. 2020 Jan;25(1):110-124. doi: 10.1111/infa.12320.
The current experiments investigate how infants use goal-directed action to reason about intentionally sampled outcomes in a probabilistic inference paradigm. Older infants and young children are flexible in their expectations of sampling: They expect random samples to reflect population statistics and non-random samples to reflect an agent's preferences or goals (Kushnir, Xu, & Wellman, 2010; Xu & Denison, 2009). However, more recent work shows that probabilistic inference comes online at approximately 6 months (Denison, Reed, & Xu, 2013; Kayhan, Gredebäck, & Lindskog, 2017; Ma & Xu, 2011; Wellman, Kushnir, Xu, & Brink, 2016), and thus, these sampling assumptions can be investigated at the age probabilistic reasoning first emerges. Results indicate that 6-month-old infants expect a human agent to sample in accord with their goal and do not expect the same of an unintentional agent-a mechanical claw. By 9.5 months, infants expect the mechanical claw to sample in accord with random sampling. These results suggest that infants use goals to make inferences about intentional sampling, under appropriate conditions at 6 months, and they have expectations of the kinds of samples a mechanical device should obtain by 9.5 months.
当前的实验研究了婴儿如何在概率推理范式中通过目标导向的行动来推理有目的抽样的结果。年龄较大的婴儿和幼儿在抽样期望上具有灵活性：他们期望随机抽样反映总体统计数据，而非随机抽样反映代理人的偏好或目标（Kushnir、Xu 和 Wellman，2010；Xu 和 Denison，2009）。然而，最近的研究表明，概率推理大约在 6 个月时开始出现（Denison、Reed 和 Xu，2013；Kayhan、Gredebäck 和 Lindskog，2017；Ma 和 Xu，2011；Wellman、Kushnir、Xu 和 Brink，2016），因此，可以在概率推理首次出现的年龄调查这些抽样假设。研究结果表明，6 个月大的婴儿期望人类代理人根据他们的目标进行抽样，而不期望无意识的代理——机械爪也这样做。到 9.5 个月时，婴儿期望机械爪按照随机抽样进行抽样。这些结果表明，婴儿在适当的条件下，在 6 个月时使用目标来进行有目的的抽样推理，并且他们期望机械装置应该在 9.5 个月时获得的样本类型。
