Psychological Reasoning in Infancy.
By R. Baillargeon, Rose M. Scott, Lin Bian. 2016
211 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Adults routinely make sense of others' actions by inferring the mental states that underlie these actions. Over the past two decades, developmental researchers have made significant advances in understanding the origins of this ability in infancy. This evidence indicates that when infants observe an agent act in a simple scene, they infer the agent's mental states and then use these mental states, together with a principle of rationality (and its corollaries of efficiency and consistency), to predict and interpret the agent's subsequent actions and to guide their own actions toward the agent. In this review, we first describe the initial demonstrations of infants' sensitivity to the efficiency and consistency principles. We then examine how infants identify novel entities as agents. Next, we summarize what is known about infants' ability to reason about agents' motivational, epistemic, and counterfactual states. Finally, we consider alternative interpretations of these findings and discuss the current controversy about the relation between implicit and explicit psychological reasoning.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Cognitive Neuroscience
- Greg Wayne
- Matthew Botvinick
- Adam Henry Marblestone
- Konrad Paul Kording
- H. Francis Song
- J. Cohen
- Karl J. Friston
- Sergey Levine
In Developmental and Educational Psychology
- S. M. Ali Eslami
- Chiyuan Zhang
- H. Francis Song
- Adam Henry Marblestone
- Frank Perbet
- Konrad Paul Kording
- Neil C. Rabinowitz
- Matthew Botvinick
Citations in the corpus
- Machine Theory of Mind (2018, methodology): “Fourth, a Theory of Mind is important for social beings as it informs our social decision-making.”
- Toward an Integration of Deep Learning and Neuroscience (2016, background): “…to causes in the world: emotions should have specific types of strong couplings to various other higher-level variables such as goal-satisfaction, should be expressed through the face, and so on (Phillips et al., 2002; Skerry and Spelke, 2014; Baillargeon et al., 2016; Lyons and Cheries, 2016).”
- What's worth the effort: Ten-month-old infants infer the value of goals from the costs of actions (2017, unknown): “First, they support the thesis that an abstract, coherent and productive system guides the analysis of agents and their actions (Baillargeon et al., 2016; Carey, 2009; Gergely & Csibra, 2003), and go beyond them by providing and testing a proposal for the specific form and content that express the…”