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 language | English |
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Pages | 3339-3345 |
Number of pages | 7 |
State | Published - 2022 |
Event | 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022 - Toronto, Canada Duration: 27 Jul 2022 → 30 Jul 2022 |
Conference
Conference | 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Cognitive Diversity, CogSci 2022 |
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Country/Territory | Canada |
City | Toronto |
Period | 27/07/22 → 30/07/22 |
Keywords
- action interpretation
- competence
- infant cognition
- naïve utility calculus