Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants

Nicoló Cesana-Arlotti*, Ana Martín, Ernő Téglás, Liza Vorobyova, Ryszard Cetnarski, Luca L. Bonatti

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the identity of an object, here we show that 12- and 19-month-old infants look longer at outcomes that are inconsistent with a logical inference necessary to resolve such ambiguities. At the moment of a potential deduction, infants’ pupils dilated, and their eyes moved toward the ambiguous object when inferences could be computed, in contrast to transparent scenes not requiring inferences to identify the object. These oculomotor markers resembled those of adults inspecting similar scenes, suggesting that intuitive and stable logical structures involved in the interpretation of dynamic scenes May be part of the fabric of the human mind.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1263-1266
Number of pages4
JournalScience
Volume359
Issue number6381
DOIs
StatePublished - 16 Mar 2018

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this