Minimal Cues of Possession Transfer Compel Infants to Ascribe the Goal of Giving

• Main Authors: Denis Tatone, Mikołaj Hernik, Gergely Csibra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: The MIT Press 2019-05-01
• Series: Open Mind
• Subjects: action understanding; giving action schema; infants; goal ascription
• Online Access: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/opmi_a_00024

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.