Is Agency Skin Deep? Surface Attributes Influence Infants' Sensitivity to Goal‐Directed Action

José J. Guajardo · Amanda L. Woodward

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Child and Animal Learning Development Social Robot Interaction and HRI Action Observation and Synchronization

Abstract

Abstract Three studies investigated the role of surface attributes in infants' identification of agents, using a habituation paradigm designed to tap infants' interpretation of grasping as goal directed (Woodward, 1998). When they viewed a bare human hand grasping objects, 7‐ and 12‐month‐old infants focused on the relation between the hand and its goal. When the surface properties of the hand were obscured by a glove, however, neither 7‐ nor 12‐month‐old infants represented its actions as goal directed (Study 1). Next, infants were shown that the gloved hands were part of a person either prior to (Study 2) or during (Study 3) the habituation procedure. Infants who actively monitored the gloved person in Study 2 and older infants in Study 3 interpreted the gloved reaches as goal directed. Thus, varying the extent to which an entity is identifiable as a person impacts infants' interpretation of the entity as an agent.

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1995Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind 1995Mindblindness 1998Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach 1995Taking the intentional stance at 12 months of age 2000Do young children have adult syntactic competence?2005Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others' actions 1999Goal attribution without agency cues: the perception of ‘pure reason’ in infancy 1990The infant's theory of self-propelled objects

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2005The infant origins of intentional understanding 2018How do 3-month-old infants attribute preferences to a human agent?2012An association account of false belief understanding 2009Inferring the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants 2008Encoding the goal of an object‐directed but uncompleted reaching action in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants 2011Evidence for a unitary goal concept in 12-month-old infants

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