Jeannine Rainbolt College of Education, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, United States.
Psychological Sciences, University of California Merced, Merced, CA, United States.
Cogn Emot. 2022 Sep;36(6):1196-1202. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2022.2084040. Epub 2022 Jun 6.
Infants use statistical information in their environment, as well as others' emotional communication, to understand the intentions of social partners. However, rarely do researchers consider these two sources of social information in tandem. This study assessed 2-year-olds' attributions of intentionality from non-random sampling events and subsequent discrete emotion reactions. Infants observed an experimenter remove five objects from either the non-random minority (18%) or random majority (82%) of a sample and express either joy, disgust, or sadness after each selection. Two-year-olds inferred the experimenter's intentionality by giving her the object that she had previously selected when she expressed joy or disgust after non-random sampling events, but not when she expressed sadness or sampled at random. These findings demonstrate that infants use both statistical regularities and discrete emotion communication to infer an agent's intentions. In particular, the present findings show that 2-year-olds infer that an agent can intentionally select a preferred an undesired object from a sample as a function of the discrete emotion. Implications for the development of inferring intentionality from statistical sampling events and discrete emotion communication are discussed.
婴儿利用环境中的统计信息和他人的情感交流来理解社会伙伴的意图。然而，研究人员很少将这两种社会信息来源同时考虑。本研究评估了 2 岁儿童从非随机抽样事件和随后的离散情绪反应中归因于意图的情况。婴儿观察到实验者从非随机的少数（18%）或随机的多数（82%）样本中取出五个物体，并且在每次选择后表达喜悦、厌恶或悲伤。当实验者在非随机抽样事件后表达喜悦或厌恶时，2 岁的婴儿会根据她之前选择的物体来推断她的意图，但当她表达悲伤或随机抽样时则不会。这些发现表明，婴儿同时使用统计规律和离散的情感交流来推断主体的意图。具体来说，本研究结果表明，2 岁的婴儿推断出主体可以根据离散的情感，从样本中有意选择一个喜欢的或不喜欢的物体。讨论了从统计抽样事件和离散情感交流中推断意图的发展意义。
