Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 107, Issue 40, Pages 17140-17145Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914056107
Keywords
cognitive development; agency; entropy; infancy; childhood
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) [R37HD023922, F2MH64269]
- National Science Foundation [1018733]
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada)
- Direct For Computer & Info Scie & Enginr [1018733] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Div Of Information & Intelligent Systems [1018733] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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The world around us presents two fundamentally different forms of patterns: those that appear random and those that appear ordered. As adults we appreciate that these two types of patterns tend to arise from very different sorts of causal processes. Typically, we expect that, whereas agents can increase the orderliness of a system, inanimate objects can cause only increased disorder. Thus, one major division in the world of causal entities is between those that are capable of reversing local entropy and those that are not. In the present studies we find that sensitivity to the unique link between agents and order emerges quite early in development. Results from three experiments suggest that by 12 mo of age infants associate agents with the creation of order and inanimate objects with the creation of disorder. Such expectations appear to be robust into children's preschool years and are hypothesized to result from a more general understanding that agents causally intervene on the world in fundamentally different ways from inanimate objects.
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