Abstract
Human infants’ readiness to interpret impoverished object-transfer events as acts of giving suggests the existence of a dedicated action schema for identifying interactions based on active object transfer. Here we investigated the sensitivity of this giving schema by testing whether 15-month-olds would interpret the displacement of an object as an agent’s goal even if it could be dismissed as a side effect of a different goal. Across two looking-time experiments, we showed that, when the displacement only resulted in a change of object location, infants expected the agent to pursue the other goal. However, when the same change of location resulted in a transfer of object possession, infants reliably adopted this outcome as the agent’s goal. The interpretive shift that the mere presence of a potential recipient caused is testament to the infants’ susceptibility to cues of benefit delivery: an action efficiently causing a transfer of object possession appeared sufficient to induce the interpretation of goal-directed giving even if the transfer was carried out without any interaction between Giver and Givee and was embedded in an event affording an alternative goal interpretation.
Highlights
Tatone, Geraci, and Csibra (2015) proposed that infants’ ability to represent giving actions is served by a specialized action schema
As the looking-time reversal in the Giving condition showed, the presence of agent Red proved sufficient to induce such an interpretive shift. The presence of this giving cue exerted an even greater influence than originally predicted: rather than entertaining both outcomes as possible goal states, the infants in the Giving condition reliably expected agent Blue to approach object A, apparently disregarding the alternative goal that the infants in the Disposing condition attributed to agent Blue
The same cues that prompted infants to interpret the displacement of object A as functional to the approach of object B in the Disposing condition were available in the Giving condition
Summary
Tatone, Geraci, and Csibra (2015) proposed that infants’ ability to represent giving actions is served by a specialized action schema The function of such a schema is to provide a structural template for the efficient representation of social interactions involving active resource transfer (giving). The schema embeds a set of assumptions about the number and kind of constituents that a giving event should exhibit as well as their causal relations These assumptions correspond to diagnostic cues that the schema is sensitive to (1) the presence of two agents (a Giver and a Givee) and one object (the transferred item) and (2) a teleological and causal relation between the Giver’s action and the transfer of object possession to the Givee..
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