Knowing who likes who: The early developmental basis of coalition understanding

Group biases based on broad category membership appear early in human development. However, like many other primates humans inhabit social worlds also characterised by small groups of social coalitions which are not demarcated by visible signs or social markers. A critical cognitive challenge for a young child is thus how to extract information concerning coalition structure when coalitions are dynamic and may lack stable and outwardly visible cues to membership. Therefore, the ability to decode behavioural cues of affiliations present in everyday social interactions between individuals would have conferred powerful selective advantages during our evolution. This would suggest that such an ability may emerge early in life, however, little research has investigated the developmental origins of such processing. The present paper will review recent empirical research which indicates that in the first 2 years of life infants achieve a host of social-cognitive abilities that make them well adapted to processing coalition-affiliations of others. We suggest that such an approach can be applied to better understand the origins of intergroup attitudes and biases. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

The Naïve Utility Calculus unifies spatial and statistical routes to preference

Humans can seamlessly infer what other people like, based onwhat they do. Broadly, two types of accounts have beenproposed to explain different aspects of this ability. A firstaccount focuses on inferences from spatial information:agents choose and move towards things they like. A secondaccount focuses on inferences from statistical information:uncommon choices reveal preferences more clearly comparedto common choices. Here we argue that these two kinds ofinferences can be explained by the assumption that agentsmaximize utilities. We test this idea in a task where adultparticipants infer an agent’s preferences using a combinationof spatial and statistical information. We show that our modelpredicts human answers with higher accuracy than a set ofplausible alternative models

What should a robot learn from an infant? Mechanisms of action interpretation and observational learning in infancy

The paper provides a summary of our recent research on preverbal infants (using violation-of-expectation and observational learning paradigms) demonstrating that one-year-olds interpret and draw systematic inferences about other’s goal-directed actions, and can rely on such inferences when imitating other’s actions or emulating their goals. To account for these findings it is proposed that one-year-olds apply a non-mentalistic action interpretational system, the ’teleological stance’ that represents actions by relating relevant aspects of reality (action, goal-state, and situational constraints) through the principle of rational action, which assumes that actions function to realize goal-states by the most efficient means available in the actor’s situation. The relevance of these research findings and the proposed theoretical model for how to realize the goal of epigenetic robotics of building a ’socially relevant’ humanoid robot is discussed

Concept-based word learning in human infants

Whether infants initially learn object labels by mapping them onto similarity-defining perceptual features or onto concepts of object kinds remains under debate. We addressed this question by attempting to teach infants words for behaviorally defined action roles. In a series of experiments, we found that 14-month-olds could rapidly learn a label for the role played by the chaser in a chasing scenario, even when the different instances of chasers did not share perceptual features. Furthermore, when infants could choose, they preferred to interpret a novel label as expressing the agent’s role within the observed interaction rather than as being associated with the agent’s appearance. These results demonstrate that infants can learn labels as easily (or even more easily) for concepts identified by abstract behavioral characteristics as for objects identified by perceptual features. Thus, at early stages of word learning, infants already expect that novel words express concepts

'Obsessed with goals': functions and mechanisms of teleological interpretation of actions in humans

Humans show a strong and early inclination to interpret observed behaviours of others as goal-directed actions. We identify two main epistemic functions that this ‘teleological obsession’ serves: on-line prediction and social learning. We show how teleological action interpretations can serve these functions by drawing on two kinds of inference (‘action-to-goal’ or ‘goal-to-action’), and argue that both types of teleological inference constitute inverse problems that can only be solved by further assumptions. We pinpoint the assumptions that the three currently proposed mechanisms of goal attribution (action-effect associations, simulation procedures, and teleological reasoning) imply, and contrast them with the functions they are supposed to fulfil. We argue that while action-effect associations and simulation procedures are generally well suited to serve on-line action monitoring and prediction, social learning of new means actions and artefact functions requires the inferential productivity of teleological reasoning

Reasoning about artifacts at 24 months: The developing teleofunctional stance

Abstract From the age of 2.5, children use social information to rapidly form enduring functionbased artifact categories. The present study asked whether even younger children likewise constrain their use of objects according to teleo-functional beliefs that artifacts are ''for'' particular purposes, or whether they use objects as means to any desired end. Twenty-fourmonth-old toddlers learned about two novel tools that were physically equivalent but perceptually distinct; one tool was assigned implicit function information through a short demonstration. At test, toddlers returned to the demonstrated tool when asked to repeat the task, but, unlike older children, also used it for another task. Results imply that at 24 months, toddlers expect artifacts to have functions and proficiently use a model's intentional use to inform tool choices, suggesting cognition that differs from that of tool-using monkeys. However, their artifact representations are not yet specified enough to support exclusive patterns of tool use

Interacting mindreaders

Could interacting mindreaders be in a position to know things which they would be unable to know if they were manifestly passive observers? This paper argues that they could. Mindreading is sometimes reciprocal: the mindreader's target reciprocates by taking the mindreader as a target for mindreading. The paper explains how such reciprocity can significantly narrow the range of possible interpretations of behaviour where mindreaders are, or appear to be, in a position to interact. A consequence is that revisions and extensions are needed to standard theories of the evidential basis of mindreading. The view also has consequences for understanding how abilities to interact combined with comparatively simple forms of mindreading may explain the emergence, in evolution or development, of sophisticated forms of social cognition

A tudatelmélet életkori változásainak és szerepének áttekintése óvodáskortól fiatal felnőttkorig

A tudatelmélet (Theory of Mind, ToM) gyermekkori tipikus fejlődése és atipikus mintázata számos pszichológiai, pszichiátriai és neurológiai kutatás témájául szolgál, mérésére sokféle eljárást használnak. A tudatelmélet képességének csecsemőkori és óvodáskori fejlődési állomásainak leírása és empirikus vizsgálata sok kutatás alapja, azonban a tudatelmélet iskoláskori, serdülőkori fejlődésére vonatkozó adatok kevéssé lelhetők fel a szakirodalomban. Jelen tanulmányban a tudatelmélet kisgyermekkori, serdülőkori fejlődését tekintjük át, továbbá kitérünk a tudatelmélet és a szociális készségek kapcsolatának vizsgálatára, illetve az iskolai alkalmazkodásban való jelentőségére

Changing minds: Children's inferences about third party belief revision

By the age of 5, children explicitly represent that agents can have both true and false beliefs based on epistemic access to information (e.g., Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001). Children also begin to understand that agents can view identical evidence and draw different inferences from it (e.g., Carpendale & Chandler, 1996). However, much less is known about when, and under what conditions, children expect other agents to change their minds. Here, inspired by formal ideal observer models of learning, we investigate children's expectations of the dynamics that underlie third parties' belief revision. We introduce an agent who has prior beliefs about the location of a population of toys and then observes evidence that, from an ideal observer perspective, either does, or does not justify revising those beliefs. We show that children's inferences on behalf of third parties are consistent with the ideal observer perspective, but not with a number of alternative possibilities, including that children expect other agents to be influenced only by their prior beliefs, only by the sampling process, or only by the observed data. Rather, children integrate all three factors in determining how and when agents will update their beliefs from evidence.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (1231216)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (0744213)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (STC Center for Brains, Minds and Machines Award CCF-1231216)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (0744213