Infants infer motor competence from differences in agent-specific relative action costs

Barbara Pomiechowska, Gergely Csibra

Research output: Contribution to conference typesPaperpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Determining others' motor competence is critical for action prediction and social decision making. One aspect of competence judgements involves assessing how costly a given action is for a particular agent (e.g., whether climbing 4 floors of stairs is a piece of cake or a tough physical exercise). Such information is not given away by the agents' physical appearance but can be inferred based on their behavior. Across two looking-time experiments, we show that 10-month-olds can infer and compare agent-specific costs of different actions. After being familiarized with agent A jumping over low obstacles and walking around high obstacles, and agent B jumping over both low and high obstacles, infants worked out that for B jumping bears little cost, while for A jumping high is more costly than detouring the obstacles by walking. Furthermore, they used this motor competence judgements to predict both agents' actions in a new environment. These findings suggest that basic building blocks competence evaluations are available in infancy and may be rooted in infants' action interpretation skills.

Original languageEnglish
Pages3339-3345
Number of pages7
StatePublished - 2022
Event44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022 - Toronto, Canada
Duration: 27 Jul 202230 Jul 2022

Conference

Conference44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityToronto
Period27/07/2230/07/22

Keywords

  • action interpretation
  • competence
  • infant cognition
  • naïve utility calculus

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