School of Psychological & Behavioral Sciences, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, USA.
Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri at Columbia, Columbia, Missouri, USA.
Child Dev. 2022 Mar;93(2):571-581. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13707. Epub 2021 Nov 12.
Is early reasoning about an agent's knowledge best characterized by a mentalistic stance, a teleological stance, or both? In this research, 5-month-old infants (N = 64, 50% female, 83% White) saw a novel eyeless agent consistently approach object-A as opposed to object-B. Although infants could always see both objects, a screen separated object-B from the agent. When object-B protruded above the screen, infants interpreted the agent's actions as revealing a preference for object-A over object-B. When object-B did not protrude above the screen, however, infants refrained from attributing such a preference: Consistent with mentalistic accounts, they reasoned that the agent's representation of the scene did not include object-B, and they used the agent's incomplete representation, non-egocentrically, to interpret its actions.
婴儿（5 个月大，N=64，女性占 50%，白人占 83%）被展示了一个没有眼睛的代理，它始终一致地接近物体 A 而不是物体 B。尽管婴儿始终可以看到两个物体，但一个屏幕将物体 B 与代理隔开。当物体 B 从屏幕上方伸出时，婴儿将代理的动作解释为表明它更喜欢物体 A 而不是物体 B。然而，当物体 B 没有从屏幕上方伸出时，婴儿不会将这种偏好归因于代理：与心理主义解释一致，他们推断代理对场景的表示不包括物体 B，并且他们非自我中心地使用代理的不完整表示来解释其动作。
