Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States; The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States; The Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States.
Cognition. 2024 May;246:105760. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105760. Epub 2024 Mar 5.
Human social life requires an understanding of the mental states of one's social partners. Two people who look at the same objects often experience them differently, as a twinkling light or a planet, a 6 or a 9, and a random cat or Cleo, their pet. Indeed, a primary purpose of communication is to share distinctive experiences of objects or events. Here, we test whether toddlers (14-15 months) are sensitive to another agent's distinctive experiences of pictures when determining the goal underlying the agent's actions in a minimally social context. We conducted nine experiments. Across seven of these experiments (n = 206), toddlers viewed either videotaped or live events in which an actor, whose perspective differed from their own, reached (i) for pictures of human faces that were upright or inverted or (ii) for pictures that depicted a rabbit or a duck at different orientations. Then either the actor or the toddler moved to a new location that aligned their perspectives, and the actor alternately reached to each of the two pictures. By comparing toddlers' looking to the latter reaches, we tested whether their goal attributions accorded with the actor's experience of the pictured objects, with their own experience of the pictured objects, or with no consistency. In no experiment did toddlers encode the actor's goal in accord with his experiences of the pictures. In contrast, in a similar experiment that manipulated the visibility of a picture rather than the experience that it elicited, toddlers (n = 32) correctly expected the actor's action to depend on what was visible and occluded to him, rather than to themselves. In a verbal version of the tasks, older children (n = 35) correctly inferred the actor's goal in both cases. These findings provide further evidence for a dissociation between two kinds of mental state reasoning: When toddlers view an actor's object-directed action under minimally social conditions, they take account of the actor's visual access to the object but not the actor's distinctive experience of the object.
人类的社会生活需要理解其社会伙伴的心理状态。两个人观察相同的物体时，往往会有不同的体验，例如，闪烁的灯光或行星、6 或 9、随机的猫或宠物 Cleo。实际上，交流的主要目的是分享对物体或事件的独特体验。在这里，我们测试了幼儿（14-15 个月）在最小社交环境中确定主体行为背后的目标时，是否对另一个主体对图片的独特体验敏感。我们进行了九项实验。在其中的七项实验中（n=206），幼儿观看了录像或现场事件，在这些事件中，一个与自己视角不同的演员伸手去拿（i）人脸图片，这些图片要么是直立的，要么是倒置的，要么是（ii）以不同方向描绘兔子或鸭子的图片。然后，演员或幼儿移动到一个新的位置，使他们的视角一致，演员轮流伸向两张图片中的每一张。通过比较幼儿对后者的注视，我们测试了他们的目标归因是否与演员对图片对象的体验、他们自己对图片对象的体验或没有一致性一致。在没有一个实验中，幼儿根据演员对图片的体验来编码他的目标。相比之下，在一个类似的实验中，我们操纵了图片的可见性而不是引起的体验，幼儿（n=32）正确地期望演员的行为取决于他能看到什么和被什么遮挡，而不是取决于他们自己。在任务的口头版本中，年龄较大的儿童（n=35）在两种情况下都正确推断了演员的目标。这些发现进一步证明了两种心理状态推理之间的分离：当幼儿在最小社交条件下观察演员的目标导向行为时，他们会考虑到演员对物体的视觉访问，但不会考虑到演员对物体的独特体验。
