@article {5286, title = {Dangerous Ground: One-Year-Old Infants are Sensitive to Peril in Other Agents{\textquoteright} Action PlansAbstract}, journal = {Open Mind}, volume = {6}, year = {2022}, month = {10/2022}, pages = {211 - 231}, abstract = {

Do infants appreciate that other people{\textquoteright}s actions may fail, and that these failures endow risky actions with varying degrees of negative utility (i.e., danger)? Three experiments, including a pre-registered replication, addressed this question by presenting 12- to 15-month-old infants (N = 104, 52 female, majority White) with an animated agent who jumped over trenches of varying depth towards its goals. Infants expected the agent to minimize the danger of its actions, and they learned which goal the agent preferred by observing how much danger it risked to reach each goal, even though the agent{\textquoteright}s actions were physically identical and never failed. When we tested younger, 10-month-old infants (N = 102, 52 female, majority White) in a fourth experiment, they did not succeed consistently on the same tasks. These findings provide evidence that one-year-old infants use the height that other agents could fall from in order to explain and predict those agents{\textquoteright} actions.

}, keywords = {action understanding, agency, cognitive development, infancy, open data, open materials, pre-registered}, doi = {10.1162/opmi_a_00063}, url = {https://direct.mit.edu/opmi/article/doi/10.1162/opmi_a_00063/113342/Dangerous-Ground-One-Year-Old-Infants-are}, author = {Liu, Shari and Pepe, Bill and Ganesh Kumar, Manasa and Ullman, Tomer D. and Tenenbaum, Joshua B. and Spelke, Elizabeth S.} } @proceedings {4261, title = {Draping an Elephant: Uncovering Children{\textquoteright}s Reasoning About Cloth-Covered Objects}, year = {2019}, month = {07/2019}, address = {Montreal, Canada}, abstract = {

Humans have an intuitive understanding of physics. They can predict how a physical scene will unfold, and reason about how it came to be. Adults may rely on such a physical representation for visual reasoning and recognition, going beyond visual features and capturing objects in terms of their physical properties. Recently, the use of draped objects in recognition was used to examine adult object representations in the absence of many common visual features. In this paper we examine young children{\textquoteright}s reasoning about draped objects in order to examine the develop of physical object representation. In addition, we argue that a better understanding of the development of the concept of cloth as a physical entity is worthwhile in and of itself, as it may form a basic ontological category in intuitive physical reasoning akin to liquids and solids. We use two experiments to investigate young children{\textquoteright}s (ages 3{\textendash}5) reasoning about cloth-covered objects, and find that they perform significantly above chance (though far from perfectly) indicating a representation of physical objects that can interact dynamically with the world. Children{\textquoteright}s success and failure pattern is similar across the two experiments, and we compare it to adult behavior. We find a small effect, which suggests the specific features that make reasoning about certain objects more difficult may carry into adulthood.

}, keywords = {analysis-by-synthesis, cloth, cognitive development, imagination, intuitive physics, object recognition, occlusion, perception, vision}, url = {https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2019/papers/0506/index.html}, author = {Tomer D Ullman and Eliza Kosoy and Ilker Yildirim and Amir Arsalan Soltani and Max Siegel and Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Elizabeth S Spelke} } @article {2358, title = {Six-month-old infants expect agents to minimize the cost of their actions}, journal = {Cognition}, volume = {160}, year = {2017}, month = {03/2017}, pages = {35-42}, abstract = {

Substantial evidence indicates that infants expect agents to move directly to their goals when no obstacles block their paths, but the representations that articulate this expectation and its robustness have not been characterized. Across three experiments (total N = 60), 6-month-old infants responded to a novel, curvilinear action trajectory on the basis of its efficiency, in accord with the expectation that an agent will move to its goal on the least costly path that the environment affords. Infants expected minimally costly action when presented with a novel constraint, and extended this expectation to agents who had previously acted inefficiently. Infants{\textquoteright} understanding of goal-directed action cannot be explained alone by sen- sitivity to specific features of agent{\textquoteright}s actions (e.g. agents tend to move on straight paths, along supporting surfaces, when facing their goals directly) or extrapolations of agents{\textquoteright} past actions to their future ones (e.g. if an agent took the shortest path to an object in the past, it will continue to do so in the future). Instead, infants{\textquoteright} reasoning about efficiency accords with the overhypothesis that agents minimize the cost of their actions.

}, keywords = {cognitive development, goal inference, open data, open materials, social cognition}, issn = {00100277}, doi = {10.1016/j.cognition.2016.12.007}, url = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001002771630302X}, author = {Shari Liu and Elizabeth S Spelke} } @article {1206, title = {Not So Innocent: Toddlers{\textquoteright} Inferences About Costs and Culpability}, journal = {Psychological Science }, volume = {26}, year = {2015}, month = {05/2015}, pages = {633-40}, abstract = {

Adults{\textquoteright} social evaluations are influenced by their perception of other people{\textquoteright}s competence and motivation: Helping when it is difficult to help is praiseworthy, and not helping when it is easy to help is reprehensible. Here, we look at whether children{\textquoteright}s social evaluations are affected by the costs that agents incur. We found that toddlers can use the time and effort associated with goal-directed actions to distinguish agents, and that children prefer agents who incur fewer costs in completing a goal. When two agents refuse to help, children retain a preference for the more competent agent but infer that the less competent agent is nicer. These results suggest that children value agents who incur fewer costs, but understand that failure to engage in a low-cost action implies a lack of motivation. We propose that a naive utility calculus underlies inferences from the costs and rewards of goal-directed action and thereby supports social cognition.

}, keywords = {cognitive development, open data, open materials, social cognition, theory of mind}, doi = {10.1177/0956797615572806}, url = {http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/04/09/0956797615572806}, author = {Julian Jara-Ettinger}, editor = {Joshua B. Tenenbaum and Laura Schulz} }