Journal
COGNITION
Volume 140, Issue -, Pages 14-23Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.006
Keywords
Action understanding; Cognitive development; Naive utility calculus; Rational action; Social cognition; Theory of mind
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Funding
- Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM) - NSF STC awards [CCF-1231216]
- Simons Center for the Social Brain (SCSB) award [6926004]
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Humans explain and predict other agents' behavior using mental state concepts, such as beliefs and desires. Computational and developmental evidence suggest that such inferences are enabled by a principle of rational action: the expectation that agents act efficiently, within situational constraints, to achieve their goals. Here we propose that the expectation of rational action is instantiated by a naive utility calculus sensitive to both agent-constant and agent-specific aspects of costs and rewards associated with actions. In four experiments, we show that, given an agent's choices, children (range: 5-6 year olds; N=96) can infer unobservable aspects of costs (differences in agents' competence) from information about subjective differences in rewards (differences in agents' preferences) and vice versa. Moreover, children can design informative experiments on both objects and agents to infer unobservable constraints on agents' actions. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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