Beyond rational imitation: learning arbitrary means actions from communicative demonstrations

The principle of rationality has been invoked to explain that infants expect agents to perform the most efficient means action to attain a goal. It has also been demonstrated that infants take into account the efficiency of observed actions to achieve a goal outcome when deciding whether to reenact a specific behavior or not. It is puzzling, however, that they also tend to imitate an apparently suboptimal unfamiliar action even when they can bring about the same outcome more efficiently by applying a more rational action alternative available to them. We propose that this apparently paradoxical behavior is explained by infants’ interpretation of action demonstrations as communicative manifestations of novel and culturally relevant means actions to be acquired, and we present empirical evidence supporting this proposal. In Experiment 1, we found that 14-month-olds reenacted novel arbitrary means actions only following a communicative demonstration. Experiment 2 showed that infants’ inclination to reproduce communicatively manifested novel actions is restricted to behaviors they can construe as goal-directed instrumental acts. The study also provides evidence that infants’ reenactment of the demonstrated novel actions reflects epistemic motives rather than purely social motives. We argue that ostensive communication enables infants to represent the teleological structure of novel actions even when the causal relations between means and end are cognitively opaque and apparently violate the efficiency expectation derived from the principle of rationality. This new account of imitative learning of novel means shows how the teleological stance and natural pedagogy—two separate cognitive adaptations to interpret instrumental versus communicative actions—are integrated as a system for learning socially constituted instrumental knowledge in humans

Nine-months-old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants’ goal-attribution

Human infants readily interpret others’ actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent’s future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants’ goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent’s preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent’s preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed

Learning about goals : development of action perception and action control

By using innovative paradigms, the present thesis provides convincing evidence that action-effect learning, and sensorimotor processes in general play a crucial role in the development of action- perception and production in infancy. This finding was further generalized to sequential action. Furthermore the thesis suggests that means-selection-, ends-selection information, and action-effect knowledge together feed into a unitary concept of goal. Both these findings have the potential to generate interesting new research questionNWO grant number 400-05-112Action Contro

Goal representation in the infant brain

It is well established that, from an early age, human infants interpret the movements of others as actions directed towards goals. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms which underlie this ability are hotly debated. The current study was designed to identify brain regions involved in the representation of others’ goals early in development. Studies with adults have demonstrated that the anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPS) exhibits repetition suppression for repeated goals and a release from suppression for new goals, implicating this specific region in goal representation in adults. In the current study, we used a modified paired repetition suppression design with 9-month-old infants to identify which cortical regions are suppressed when the infant observes a repeated goal versus a new goal. We find a strikingly similar response pattern and location of activity as had been reported in adults; the only brain region displaying significant repetition suppression for repeated goals and a release from suppression for new goals was the left anterior parietal region. Not only does our data suggest that the left anterior parietal region is specialized for representing the goals of others’ actions from early in life, this demonstration presents an opportunity to use this method and design to elucidate the debate over the mechanisms and cues which contribute to early action understanding

The direct perception hypothesis: perceiving the intention of another’s action hinders its precise imitation

We argue that imitation is a learning response to unintelligible actions, especially to social conventions. Various strands of evidence are converging on this conclusion, but further progress has been hampered by an outdated theory of perceptual experience. Comparative psychology continues to be premised on the doctrine that humans and nonhuman primates only perceive others’ physical ‘surface behavior’, while mental states are perceptually inaccessible. However, a growing consensus in social cognition research accepts the Direct Perception Hypothesis: primarily we see what others aim to do; we do not infer it from their motions. Indeed, physical details are overlooked – unless the action is unintelligible. On this basis we hypothesize that apes’ propensity to copy the goal of an action, rather than its precise means, is largely dependent on its perceived intelligibility. Conversely, children copy means more often than adults and apes because, uniquely, much adult human behavior is completely unintelligible to unenculturated observers due to the pervasiveness of arbitrary social conventions, as exemplified by customs, rituals, and languages. We expect the propensity to imitate to be inversely correlated with the familiarity of cultural practices, as indexed by age and/or socio-cultural competence. The Direct Perception Hypothesis thereby helps to parsimoniously explain the most important findings of imitation research, including children’s over-imitation and other species-typical and age-related variations

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: Evidence for concurrent activation models

Infants interpret third-person sequential actions as goal directed by 6 months of age, around 9 months of age they start to perform sequential actions to accomplish higher order goals. The present study employed an innovative pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study how infants represent first-person sequential actions. We aimed to contrast chaining-, concurrent- and integrated models of sequential-action representation. 9- and 12- month olds were taught action sequences consisting of two elementary actions. Thereafter the secondary action was selectively activated to assess any interactions with the primary action. Results suggest that concurrent models best capture the representations formed

Folk Theory of Mind: Conceptual Foundations of Social Cognition

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world

Who will be nice and who will be nasty?: a cross-cultural investigation of children’s moral trait inferences

In this thesis, four studies were conducted to examine how children aged 4 to 8 years and adults from China and Australia made moral trait inferences of other people on the basis of their inconsistent past actions that were dependent on contexts and motives. Specifically, in studies 1 and 2, the protagonists behaved inconsistently towards different child recipients when no adults were present, either in a predominantly prosocial or antisocial way. Next, in study 3, the predominantly prosocial protagonists undertook their prosocial behaviours either in the presence of a female teacher or in her absence. Finally, in study 4, participants were explicitly told that the protagonists’ prosocial behaviours were arising from self-presentational motives in the presence of the teacher, and were arising from altruistic motives in her absence. After each story, participants were asked to make trait judgments (study 1 to 4), motive attributions (study 3), and behaviour predictions (study 1 to 4) of the protagonist. It was found that, first, children did not start to negatively evaluate protagonists whose prosocial behaviors arose from self-presentational motives until about 8 years of age, at which time they judged that protagonists whose prosocial behaviors arose from altruistic motives to be nicer. Young children, and especially the 4-year-olds, were insensitive to contextual cues betraying self-presentational motives, and they were also susceptible to a recency effect, such that their trait judgments were highly influenced by the outcome of the last behavior exemplar in the story vignettes. Second, Chinese children were more sensitive to contextual and motive information than Australian children. Eight-year-olds from China, but not Australia, were able to spontaneously infer a protagonist’s self-presentational motives and make negative evaluations of the protagonist when they observed that his/her prosocial behaviors were only manifest in the presence of an authority figure. These older Chinese children also expected more positive future behaviors from the altruistic protagonists than from the protagonists who had self-presentational motives, thus demonstrating a clear cultural difference in sensitivity to contextual and motive information when making moral trait inferences

Visual cognition during real social interaction

Copyright @ 2012 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and 85 reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The article was made available through the Brunel University Open Access Publishing Fund.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Laboratory studies of social visual cognition often simulate the critical aspects of joint attention by having participants interact with a computer-generated avatar. Recently, there has been a movement toward examining these processes during authentic social interaction. In this review, we will focus on attention to faces, attentional misdirection, and a phenomenon we have termed social inhibition of return (Social IOR), that have revealed aspects of social cognition that were hitherto unknown. We attribute these discoveries to the use of paradigms that allow for more realistic social interactions to take place. We also point to an area that has begun to attract a considerable amount of interest—that of Theory of Mind (ToM) and automatic perspective taking—and suggest that this too might benefit from adopting a similar approach