Young infants' expectations about self-propelled objects

Abstract

Young infants possess expectations about physical events. These findings support the notion that infants are born with an abstract, unconscious, physical-reasoning system. This chapter has two sections — a summary of results from experiments that compared the response of infants to various physical events involving an inert or a self-propelled object; and a discussion on the considered links between the concept of self-propelled objects explored in this chapter and other key concepts. This chapter suggests three conclusions: infants distinguish between inert and self-propelled objects and endow self-propelled objects with an internal source of energy; infants do not view an object as self-propelled unless it provides unambiguous evidence that it can act intentionally and thus has mental states; and the infants' concepts of self-propelled object and agent function as abstract ‘kinds of explanations’ that are devoid of all mechanistic details but still make possible rich inferences about objects' actions in new contexts.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.